The Components
Eine Gegen Eine came back to me via Essen, the annual German game fair. Thus it should be no surprise--and you've probably already guessed it from the name--that the game is in German. Fortunately the designers thoughtfully included some stickers ("pasteups") to place American words over the German words on various game components.
The game itself came in a little cardboard envelope. When I'd finished pasting up stickers on it, I saw that "Eine Gegen Eine" meant "One for One". Other stickers revealed that it was "the game without rulebook: explore together how this game works." It was for "four players; age ten up; twenty minutes".
The most important sticker, however, was the one affixed right atop the flap of the envelope which said, in bright red, "Attention! Do not open this folder before you are actually about to start playing!"
And that's the other unique element of the game. It's not just a game without a rulebook, but it's also a game where part of the fun is intended to be the discovery of how the game itself plays.
That leaves me in a bit of a quandary, because I can't really explain about how the game works without spoiling it for potential future players, but at the same I need to talk about something to review it. Thus I'm bypassing my normal style for reviews and I'm going to jump straight to a discussion of Eine Gegen Eine's design.
The Game Design
I've played one other game that largely exists sans rulebook and that's Fluxx. It achieves this primarily by moving some of the text of the rules--such as the fact that you usually draw one card and play one card--to its components.
Mind you, Fluxx doesn't claim to have no rulebook, and if it did, I'd think it had taken an easy out. Eine Gegen Eine does not offer up this easy solution for rulebook-free play. Though there is a little bit of text on the components, the vast majority of the pasteups went onto the envelope. Thus, Eine Gegen Eine accomplishes its goals primarily through the use of iconography.
The results were quite interesting. Because icons can't possibly be as definitive as words, my group talked about the game quite a bit as we examined it. Some players offered hypotheses about how things worked and the rest considered them. Things were a bit rocky for a few minutes, but suddenly we were playing the game. It was like learning how to fly by throwing ourselves at the ground and missing.
(Thanks, Doug Adams.)
Other than some slight nuances, we got the gameplay pretty much right.
The resulting game was pretty simple, and I'm not confident that it's something that'll hold up to any sort of continued play, but as an experience, it was a very unique one.
The Idea of a Rulelbookless Game
Though it was interesting to see what these designers had come up with, I'm certainly not convinced that the idea of a rulebookless game--more generally--is particularly intriguing. But, I'm not convinced they thought so either.
As an experiment in how to intuitively depict rules with pictures instead of words, I think Eine Gegen Eine was a winner--because it tests the common wisdom of game icons.
German games have been doing very intuitive icons for a number of years. American games somewhat less so. Thus it wasn't a big surprise that the pictures in Eine Gegen Eine looked a lot like what's in German games today--perhaps with a bit more detail, perhaps with a bit more of a hint of action, though a lot of German icons show that action too.
Keeping that in mind, I think this game might be of the most use to game designers and game publishers--which is to say the people who are thinking about how to design games that people can easily learn.
Conclusion
Eine Gegen Eine was an interesting experience. If you have an opportunity to try it out some time, you should--though preferably with other people who also don't know the game.
