/pic7066993.png)
The residents of Huia Street are clearing their closets, looking for unwanted household items for the big community garage sale. A pile is building up on the empty section but there are troublemakers lurking, causing rather unneighborly collapses. And why does little Susie have a blowtorch? Geez, you just want to get rid of your junk!
In Flaming Pyramids, players are building one pyramid together using square tiles, but each player is trying to be the first to get rid of their own tiles.
There are 40 regular tiles with a unique combination of color, number, and material. Except toward the end of the game, players have a hand of five tiles from which to choose, but they are constrained by the building regulations and the luck of the draw. There are also four tiles that can cause fires and one extra-heavy "wild" tile: these can be harder to place without causing extensive damage the later they emerge. If your placed tile causes mayhem (a collapse, fire, or explosion), the damaged tiles go back in your supply.
Flaming Pyramids can be played as a friendly, casual game, an easy starter or filler, or as no-holds-barred multi-round competition.
The first edition (with straw, wood and rocks instead of household items) is available to play for free on the Board Game Arena platform: https://boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=flamingpyramids
- Quick-paced and simple enough for family game night.
- Thinky enough for serious gamers as a filler.
- Good replacement for Uno.
- Fast setup and teardown.
- Highly portable.
- Can have frustrating situations with no good moves.
- Difficult to recover from big explosions.
- Game can sometimes feel like it's playing you rather than you playing it.
- Offloading hand of cards to build a pyramid while dealing with collapses and flammable materials.
- Building a giant pyramid.
- Uno
- Kitten Casualty
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- card management — Deciding which cards to play and which to hold is the key to victory.
- Push Your Luck — Cards have three main bits of information, their color, their type, and their weight.
- Tile Placement — Cards are placed into a shared tableau and their placement there has a great impact on the game.