Pyramid Review
StrataGem
Published by Playroom Entertainment
Designed by Maureen Hiron
90 cards, rulebook in English, Spanish, French, & German, full-color, two to four players, $10.00
It's like a tennis game: Out of the Box Publishing puts out a good game, then Playroom Entertainment follows up with one of their own. StrataGem is their careful little card game of arranging jewels in the best order.
The object of the game is to have the highest point total after all rounds are played.
The dealer passes out eight cards to each player, and sets the rest aside as the draw deck. Cards are of two types: gems and thieves. The gem cards come in one of six colors, and each suit has a number of gems from one to six (two of each number). That leaves 18 cards as thieves.
The dealer goes first, and his initial play must be a gem card. He plays, draws a card to replace it, and play passes to the next person. Gems are laid down in front of you, and eventually must form a grid three cards on a side. Once played, any two cards on the table must remain in the same relative positions, but you aren't locked into where those fall in your grid until you play more cards. So if you have two cards sitting side by side, they may end up being the two top and leftmost cards in you grid, or the leftmost cards of the middle row, or even the rightmost in any row. If you play a third card so they're laid out left to right, you've got a row, but you might choose that . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: July 1, 2005
Copyright © 2005 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.