Matthew BaileyGame 33# of the “Now & Then Summer Marathon 2024” is “Mister Diamond” played with Jack(9) and Toby(6) and the first of this years “East Asian Import” sub-series.
“Mister Diamond” is a really unusual Japanese game, a slightly modified re-release of an old Ravensburger game from the early 90s. The way the game works is pretty simple: you have a board with 16 unmovable diamonds on it, and on that board, you place a number of diamonds that can be moved. You wiggle everything around, rotate everything, and make sure everyone covers their eyes so that no one knows which diamonds are pick-upable and which ones aren’t.
Thematically, the ones that can’t be moved are fake, and the ones that can be picked up are real. You play a diamond miner to try to work out which are real diamonds.
There are three cards spread out in a shop. These cards are valued from one thousand to three thousand, each holding one, two, or three diamond slots respectively. When you pick up a diamond, you can place it on any one of the cards, and if you complete a card, you get to take that card. There is also a three-slot steal card that lets you steal a card from another person.
This continues until there are only 16 diamonds remaining on the table, thereby leaving the fake diamonds. The person with the most money in diamonds is the winner.
I’m not normally a massive fan of memory games, but this one is really cool. The actual act of trying to work out which are the real diamonds, while also trying to remember which ones other people have picked up, is really appealing and works really well.
When I first set this up, I was pretty confident that after a few times playing, I could work out just by looking at the pattern of diamonds which were the fake ones. But actually, once you’ve rotated it a few times and mixed all the diamonds about, I couldn’t do this as well as I thought I could. There is one specific set of solid diamonds spaced out in quite a specific way that I was convinced I could spot every single time we reset the board, but more often than not, I got it wrong.
From a production point of view, everything is a little bit plasticky, but it works well, and the cards used for the jewellery items are decent. While it’s not relevant to gameplay, I absolutely adore the old-style cartoon artwork and bright, vivid colours on the game’s box.
We really enjoyed this, and I was really glad I picked it up. I got my copy from “Travel Games” FOR £32 which was reasonable (link in comments), and as always if they run out of immediate stock you can contact Ben Davenward, and he will do his best to get a copy for you. Equally, it is available in other places online if you do a quick Google search. Alternatively, you could try to get hold of an old Ravensburger copy on eBay, although I will say the way that the cards work in the Ravensburger version is slightly different from the way they work in this version.
Really unusual game… great stuff… and yes there are 3 more unusual Japanese imports coming before the end of the Summer.
