My sister Katelin bought me a game a while back called Iota. I hadn’t ever heard of it, but she said it was fun and that I might like it. It’s worth noting that my sister and I have very different preferences in games. She prefers very social games with light rulesets, and I tend to go for more strategy-oriented games. So while I don’t want to sound ungrateful, it’s hard for my sister to grok the kinds of games that I could play for hours at a time, and I confess that I hadn’t yet played Iota until last weekend.

Turns out my sister hit the nail on the head. It’s like Set crossed with Scrabble. It can play pretty quickly, since the ruleset is pretty lean, but there’s also lots of potential for more deeply analyzing the board state to optimize your plays, not just based on the points you would get for that one play but also to prevent your opponents from capitalizing on opportunities you might otherwise leave open.

I played with my wife Danielle, Katelin, and Katelin’s boyfriend Ryland. Like Set, there’s a weird learning curve that’s more of a “click” than a curve. Some people will pick up the rules right away, understanding what you mean when you say, “in each way, they’re either all the same or all different,” and they’re good to go. But that’s maybe half of the people I’ve ever seen learn the game, and the other half will make incorrect plays for a while before it finally “clicks,” and then they get how the game’s played. Ryland was a member of that second group that needed to see a few examples and non-examples of valid plays. When he did get it though, suddenly in the end of the game he had a couple of huge plays and nearly caught up to me to win.

Overall the game took about an hour to play, but we were fairly distracted, and it was a new game to most of us. I’m sure it will see more play again soon.