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Base price: $14.
2 – 6 players.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of Rainbow was provided by Allplay.
Busy week this week! Got a ton of work stuff, American Tabletop Award stuff, and then packed evenings. I’m still working very hard to try and get all this writing done, but I’m pretty solidly in a backlog. Maybe I’ll get out of it by 2027, but it’s already looking kind of dicey. Thankfully, there’s always more to talk about, and this week it’s another of Allplay’s tiny games: Rainbow! I’ve really been enjoying this series.
In Rainbow, your goal is simple: you want points! Each turn you’ll play a combo (set, single, or run) of a cards from your hand and the best combo scores the most points. The interesting thing here is that once all the combos have been played, they form the scoring pile for the next round! A big play now can leave your opponents in a good spot to take even more points later, so stay on top of things if you want to win! Will you be able to score the highest?
Contents
Setup
Not a ton! Shuffle the cards and deal one face-up to the center per player. Then, deal out the rest to form players’ starting hands. At three, you’ll just deal 14 cards and set the others aside.
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You’re good to go!
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Gameplay
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This one’s pretty easy. How the game works is simple. Each round is a trick, where players can play one or more cards. If any player plays a combo (either a run [cards in consecutive increasing order] or a set [multiple of the same card]), then all other players must play either a single or the same type of combo. If all players before you only played one card, you may play a single, a run, or a set.
Once everyone has played a card, the best combo (most cards, then highest individual card, then earliest-played, to break ties) gets to pick a point card first! They take their choice, and so on and so forth. Once all the cards have been claimed, it’s time for the next trick! Before you do that, though, all played cards are put in the center to become the new scoring cards! All cards of the same rank must be put in pairs, if they can be, and then sorted by total value. If there are more pairs and singles than there are players, remove the lowest-value pair / single and discard it. Repeat that until there are as many sets of cards as there are players, then start a new trick!
If any player runs out of cards, they’re out! They can’t play in tricks or score points anymore. If two or more players run out, the game ends after that trick! Total points and the player with the most wins!
Player Count Differences
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Not a ton, here; the one thing to watch out for is that with more players, there’s a bit of a more even spread. You might be able to get away with playing lower-value combos if you have particularly high-value rounds, because the spread may be a bunch of 12s, 10s, and then some other cards. You can score big points for low effort simply because there’s lots to get! That’s pretty fun. With fewer players, it’s hard to predict how things are going to go, since at three there are cards left out of play. It’s a bit more chaotic. If you’re interested, there’s also a two-player variant, though I feel like these games tend to thrive more with more players.
Strategy
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- It does not pay to go out quickly if you’re the only person who went out. You just get to watch everyone else score points that you could have had! In an obvious case, this means you don’t want to go out if nobody else went out this round. Otherwise, it may be worth splitting a combo into a couple singles so that you can stay in play, even if you end up with fewer points. That said, if it’s scoring 12 now or scoring 1 now and 1 later, obviously swing for the fences.
- You also, of course, do not want to end the game with a ton of high-value cards in hand; that’s a waste. That usually means you could have scored more points if you had played less conservatively, which is worth thinking about.
- There’s an ongoing tension: when do you play your high combos? If everyone plays a high combo, the next round is a little moot since all the cards will be high value. If everyone plays low, the game tends to take a while because nobody wants to spend their cards on very few points. In truth, the game oscillates a bit between high and low as players make big swings and then scale back to keep track of their remaining cards. Figuring out when to ride that wave is the big strategic question.
- I tend to try and balance the “value” of how many cards I play against how much I want to score. It’s not a perfect system, but I think spending more points to gain fewer points seems silly. This, of course, benefits runs over sets (1 – 2 – 3 – 4 is lower in total than 6 – 6), so it’s not a perfect heuristic. Feel free to let me know if you come up with a better one.
- In sufficiently high-value rounds, you can just participate and sometimes walk away pretty rich, points-wise. Sometimes I just throw a 1 because I don’t have high enough cards to win a 12 but the lowest card in play is a 5. I figure if I save my remaining high cards, I might be able to clean up later.
- Sometimes a pair is plenty; you don’t want to overbid either. The more you spend, the less you’ll be able to use later. Keep an eye on how other players are playing; you’d be surprised.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
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Pros
- The color palette is very pleasant and calming. It is called Rainbow, after all; you’d hope that the game would be colorful. And it is!
- I like a bit of ladder-climbing and trick-taking. I like here that the inputs are ladder combos, not just necessarily single cards. It’s a good way to teach both types of games without it getting too tricky.
- I really like the box size for these Allplay titles; it’s superb. They’re up there with Button Shy on games that I pretty much can take anywhere, and they have low rules overhead, which I really appreciate. Small box games that are easy to teach are a godsend for when I used to travel more for work.
- The balance of when to play a bunch of cards and when to hold back and hope you can still get something useful is interesting. Like I said, it’s a bit of an ebb and flow and watching the sort of wave of it all; I think it’s neat!
- A quick teach. Very fast to set up, tear down, and play; just a great game to keep in a backpack for on-the-go play.
Mehs
- Would have loved a symmetric card back. I love a gradient as much as the next guy but I just spent a solid minute or two flipping all the cards so that they face the same way, and my particular sense of propriety is going to waste a bunch of time on that, long-term.
Cons
- There’s a bit of luck of the draw in terms of hand quality. You may not end up with any 6s, which can be very annoying. When that happens, you kind of have to rely on getting runs, which tend to use more cards up than just simple high-value pairs. Can be a bit frustrating when that happens, but stay flexible!
Overall: 7.25 / 10
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Overall, I think Rainbow is pleasant! There’s something to be said for a light and quick game that’s neither asking nor offering a ton, and I think that this hits the spot quite nicely. It’s in the same vein as any of the numerous games you’d play with a deck of cards growing up, but I’m obviously a bit partial to speciality sets of cards with their own art and vibe. This has that in spades, and I love it. There’s a bit of wobbliness around players with “stronger” or “weaker” hands to start, but there’s enough randomness in how the cards are distributed that either it’ll wash out or the game is short enough that it’ll amortize across multiple quick games. I will say of the ones I’ve tried, I tend to be a bit more partial to Panda Panda or Fairy, but I think they have more interactivity to them than Rainbow does. Doesn’t mean anything particularly bad about Rainbow, but even with three fun games something’s going to hit a lower level in my personal stack rankings. Just the way it goes. If you’re looking for a quick card game, you need a nice introduction to trick-taking or ladder-climbing, or you just like rainbows, Rainbow might be a card game you’ll enjoy!
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