Quinto

Fascinating Game of Numbers

Quinto is Scrabble, except using numbers instead of letters. Like Scrabble the players take turns placing tiles on a board. Except here, instead of trying to spell words, they are trying to play a sequence of tiles such that the total of the numbers on the tiles is a multiple of five. For example; 4-1-6-4 is valid, 4-1-6-6 is not.

Each player starts with five tiles. They then take turns placing tiles on the board in such a way that the tiles a) connect to tiles already on the board and b) total up to a multiple of five. Sequences of tiles can be no more than five tiles in length. The player's score for a tile sequence is the total of the tiles in the sequence. When a player has played tiles they draw new tiles to fill their total back up to five. Play continues until no more tiles can be played legally at which point the player with the highest total wins.

This is an interesting variant but one that would probably get old fairly quickly. In Scrabble there are always new words to spell. Here, there is just that continual adding up to a multiple of five. There are variants in the game for play to multiples of other numbers (like seven) but they don't really do anything to enhance play, they just change it. Overall this is not one of the better games in the lineup.