Age: 4+
Players: 2-4
Difficulty: 3/10
Duration: 5-15 mins
1. Create the Board Map
Set up the board map as shown in the image below. Each of the players takes 5 black tiles to use as “pawns”.
Player One uses 1 stroke tiles, Player Two uses 2 stroke tiles, Player Three uses 3 stroke tiles and Player Four uses 4 stroke tiles.
2. Make a coin
To create a coin out of GEMJI, stick two tiles together so that both black sides are visible: one-stroke tile + a blank joker tile.
The player who's birthday is soonest from the day you are playing on goes first, play then proceeds around the group clockwise. After settling on the play order, Player 1 tosses the GEMJI coin 4 times and adds together the sum of the all tosses. They then move one of their pawns that is already on the board forward accordingly.
To move forward, the player counts the number of tiles on the pawn’s path - one ground tile marks one step forward. Only one pawn may be moved per throw of the coin. The players take turns after each pawn moves.
Every new toss allows a player to add a new pawn on the board or move existing ones forward. The same player can position their own pawns on top of each other up to a maximum of 2 tiles high.
NOTE: Once the tiles have been stacked they can be unstacked again on the next turn and used as two separate tiles or they can be moved as a 2 tile stack, but beware the below rule will then apply to BOTH of the tiles in the stack
If a pawn lands upon a ground tile occupied by the opposing player, the latter is sent off the board and must start from the beginning.
Each player starts at their own "starting pad" on the board and move their pawns clockwise around the board as shown in the image below until they complete one full loop of the board, at which point they move their pawn off the board and into their "HOME" area.
There are safe zones on the board at each of the black corners. Pawns within the safe zones can’t be attacked by the other players, instead they simply share the safe zone with their opponents until their next turn where they can move along the board.
GEMJI Frustration is a race game. The winner is the first player to get all 5 of their pawns around the board and into the "HOME" area.
Hi @sam, thank you for again publishing this so quickly. I can see why you guys love GEMJI so much, it is so addictive playing with the tiles and coming up with games to play with them. The original version of this board game is one of my daughters favourites, and now we can play it with just the GEMJI tiles, wherever we are.