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Gemblo is an abstract strategy game with translucent, colored pieces, each of which is made up of one to five hexagons. Each player has an identical set of pieces in a unique color. The goal is to get rid of all of your pieces by placing them on the hexagonal game board. Each piece that you place after the first cannot touch previously-placed pieces of the same color; instead each piece must be a distance of "1" from another piece of the same color, where 1 is the length of a side of one of the small hexagons. Another restriction is that the distance being measured can't directly cross another player's piece, but it can lie at the junction of two pieces. Once all players have placed as many pieces as they can, they count the number of hexagonal units in the pieces they couldn't place, and the player with the lowest score wins.
Gemblo supports up to six players. In the two-player version of the game, each player uses two colors of pieces.
- Crisp art and charming theme
- Accessible to lighter-weight players and families
- Kickstarter-oriented, potential delays for some runs
- tiny folk journey with heroes along the way
- Tiny creatures in a cozy drafting world
- whimsical
- Dwellings of Eldervale (cozy tableau vibe)
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Drafting — players draft cards representing tiny folk and heroes.
- Set Collection — collecting groups of cards to trigger points and bonuses.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- This game has been around since 1963.
- This is Acquire. This game is fascinating.
- The world series of board gaming is super competitive, but super friendly.
- The art is beautiful; I wish I could punch in on it quick.
- Becca did The Elder Scrolls how-to play. It hurts to bring it inside the house; literally, it was like rocks.
- I love puzzle games; labberia looks wild.
- Magical Athlete is back now in a new version implemented by Richard Garfield.
- You just grab a tile, put it on. Nope, that's not it.