Miams 

• Designer: Jules Messaud
• Publisher: KYF edition
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Roll your dice to make the most beautiful fruit skewers, and fill your Hearts track before your opponents!  Combine powerful Yums cards to skew probabilities in your favor and create unique game situations!

To start, each player gets a game sheet which shows 6 different fruit skewers.  Some of the spaces have bonus icons underneath them.  The Market board is placed on the table and all the tokens are placed in a supply. The deck of cards is shuffled and placed on the top space of the Market board.  One card is flipped face up on the five slots below the deck.  One player is chosen to be the start player.

On a turn, there are four phases: Rolling, Scoring, Buying, Winning.

1] Rolling – roll all 5 white dice and try to make a skewer combination  (Pair, trips, full house, four of a kind, straight, 5 of a kind).  Unlike a similar game with similar combinations to be made, you are only allowed to re-roll once.   Note that some of the dice faces do not show fruit but rather show big Xs on them.    The red die also has a Marshmallow face which can be wild for any other fruit.

2] Scoring – After your re-roll, choose your scoring combination and then circle the leftmost free space in the designated row.  Immediately fill in as many hearts at the bottom of your sheet as the number in the space you circled.  If there was a bonus on your circled space, resolve that now as well.  Finally, for every X on your final die roll, all opponents must cross out the leftmost empty space in any row on their sheet.  They do not score hearts for this, though they will get any bonuses from the space they crossed off.

3] Buying – now, using stars gained this turn, you can buy cards from the market. The ability on the card may be permanent or one-time use.  Other cards give effects each turn when you score.

4] Winning – see if you have crossed off all 50 hearts on your sheet. If so, the game ends at the end of the current round.  You can take extra heart tokens to keep track of your hearts in excess of 50.  The player with the most hearts wins. There is no tiebreaker.

My thoughts on the game

When I first saw Miams, I thought it was just going be a trifle, a silly Yahtzee clone.  After a few games, I realize there is definitely more than meets the eye here.  Yes, the base of the game is just rolling dice to make combinations – but the score sheet rewards both repetition of combinations as well as timely one-off’s to get bonuses.  

Furthermore, there is a neat little engine building aspect to the game as you pick up one card each turn – and you can definitely generate some powerful combinations with those cards.  In a recent game, I worked on picking up cards that gave bonuses in the scoring phase of each turn, managing to get two multiplier cards to make my in-turn scoring quite high.  Another player grabbed lots of cards that allowed him to X-off lots of spaces on his scoresheet – thus making certain rolls payoff with a huge amount.

As the game starts, players often only cross off 3 to 5 hearts per turn, and it feels like the game is going to take forever.  However, with the addition of card actions and the natural increase in scoring as your sheet gets marked up, getting to 50 happens relatively fast.

That being said, for at least half of the gamers that I’ve played with, it still felt too long for what you get.  The game does try to keep you interactive when it’s not your turn as you get to cross off things when other people roll X’s on their turn, etc – but it’s not enough to keep people fully engaged.  In the future, this is a game I’m more likely to play with 2 or 3 players, not 5.

This may end up being a good introduction to meatier gaming for newbies as most everyone is likely familiar with Yahtzee – so you’re only adding on a few incremental rules for them.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale 
• Neutral.  
• Not for me…