6 Nimmt Review (Take 5) | Why It Still Fills Any Table

6 Nimmt is a competitive card game for 2 to 10 players aged 8 and up, in 30 to 45 minutes. Everyone plays a card at once, the cards land in four rows in ascending order, and you want as few bullheads as possible because the first player to reach 66 points ends the game.

I am Spector, a dad to Alex, 7, and Emma, 10. This is the deck that lives in the door of our games cupboard, and it comes out for exactly one situation: a group is bigger than the games we own, or somebody is late. Both fixes a bigger deck would not.

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Which 6 Nimmt Box Should You Buy?

What you want	What to buy	Why
The classic, and the one most people mean	6 Nimmt! base game	104 number cards, 2 to 10 players, 8 and up, and the four rules that make the whole game. Complete on its own, and it is the cheapest box on this list
A 5th to 10th player who wants more to think about	6 Nimmt!: 30 Years Jubilee Edition	The same base game plus 13 special fan cards and the cooperative Beat the Buffalo mode for 1 to 6 players. Also the only version with a 1 player option
The 25th Anniversary special card variant	6 nimmt! 25 Jahre	104 number cards plus 28 special cards, four each of Stop, Shift, Insert, Replace, Negative = Positive, 5th Row and 7 nimmt!. A two round game with twelve cards a hand
A game for kids who cannot do subtraction yet	6 nimmt! Junior	A completely different game. Six animals go into four stables and the sixth distinct animal fills a stable, so the arithmetic is matching pictures rather than comparing numbers
An English edition under a different name	Take 5	The same Wolfgang Kramer game with identical rules. It is a name change, not a variant, so the numbers and rules on this page still apply

The honest buying order is the base box first, because it is a complete game and it costs about what a pizza costs. Add the Jubilee edition only if you already play this often and want either the solo co-op or the special cards, and leave the Junior version alone unless you have a child under about 6.

• Similarities: A small box, a short teach, and a table full of people all playing at once.
• Differences: There is no hidden information, no engine, and no board to build. It is 104 cards and four rules, and every decision happens before the cards are revealed.
• Why this game fans will enjoy it: If you want the same 'one game for a crowd' job with a little more to think about, our [Love Letter review](/games/small-box-big-bluffs-exploring-board-game-love-letter-deduction-and-risk/) is eleven cards and real deduction, and our [Exploding Kittens review](/games/exploding-kittens-board-game-review-hilarious-party-fun-or-just-hype/) is the louder version of the same party slot.

6 Nimmt at a Glance

Aspect	Details
Designer	Wolfgang Kramer
Illustrator	Franz Vohwinkel
Publisher	Amigo, first published 1994, English editions from Mayfair Games and Amigo
Players	2 to 10, and the base game is a different experience at every count
Age	8 and up on the official English rulebook
Playtime	About 45 minutes on the official rulebook, our games finish nearer 30
Setup	Shuffle, deal 10 each, turn 4 face up. Under two minutes and no assembly
Deck	104 number cards, numbered 1 to 104, no duplicates
Rows	4 rows that start with one card and never hold more than 5
Round	Exactly 10 turns, because every player starts with 10 cards
Win condition	Fewest bullheads when a player reaches 66 or more
Also in the box	Notepad and pencil in the anniversary editions, the base box is cards and rules
Awards	Deutscher Spiele Preis 1994, and recommended for the 1994 Spiel des Jahres
Real variants	Pro Variant for 2 to 6, plus 8 printed variants in the older English rulebook

How Do You Set Up 6 Nimmt?

Setup is four steps and there is no assembly, which is a large part of why this game comes out when people are already at the door.

1. Shuffle all 104 cards. A proper shuffle, not a handful, because the whole game is a distribution game and a badly shuffled deck produces rows nothing like a real one.
2. Deal 10 cards to every player, face down. At ten players that is the entire deck, all 104 cards, plus the 4 that start the rows.
3. Turn 4 cards face up in a column in the middle of the table. Each one is the first card of a row, and no row may ever hold more than 5 cards including that first one.
4. Put the rest of the deck aside. You do not touch it again until the round is over and you redeal.

You will want paper and a pencil. There is no score track, which is the one genuinely dated thing about a 1994 design, and it is why we keep a scrap of paper next to the box.

How Does a Card Play in 6 Nimmt Work?

Everyone picks one card from their hand and puts it face down in front of themselves. Cards are only revealed once every player has a card face down. Then they are placed in ascending numerical order, lowest first, and each card goes into the row the rules dictate, not the row you pick.

That resolution order is the rule most tables get wrong, and getting it wrong is why the game feels random when it is not. Turn order does not exist. Your card’s number decides when it lands, which means low cards resolve into the most crowded rows.

Rows only ever grow to the right. New cards are always added at the end of a row, next to the last card already there, and a card is never placed between two cards.

How Does a Card Get Placed in a Row?

There is never a decision here, and the two rules together always produce exactly one legal row.

1. Rule 1, ascending order. Your card can only go on a row where it is higher than that row’s last card. Anything ending above your number is simply not an option.
2. Rule 2, lowest difference. Of the rows that are still legal, your card goes in the one whose last card is closest below it. If the rows end in 12, 37, 43 and 58, your 44 goes in the third row, next to the 43, not the first.

The official rulebook’s own example uses the first cards 12, 37, 43 and 58 with four players playing 14, 15, 44 and 61. The 14 and the 15 both have to go after the 12, the 44 goes after the 43 by lowest difference, and the 61 goes after the 58.

The official rulebook also prints two ways of tripping yourself up with this, and both are worth knowing because they are the two ways it happens at our table.

• The 45 trap. You play the 45 because you can see a row ending in 41 and it looks perfect. Rule 2 sends it to the row ending in 42 instead, where the difference is smaller. If that row was full, you are taking five cards you thought were somebody else’s problem.
• The 62 trap. You play the 62 because the first row ends in 61 and you are safe. Meanwhile somebody else played a 29, which fits nowhere, so they took the first row and their 29 is now its last card. Your 62 goes to a different row entirely, and that row might be the one that was about to overflow.

When Do You Have to Take a Row?

There are two separate rules and most people learn them as one. They are not the same and they do not feel the same when they fire.

• Rule 3, full row. A row with 5 cards in it is full. If Rule 2 sends your sixth card there, you take all five cards in that row and your card becomes the new first card of the row.
• Rule 4, low card. If your card is lower than the last card of all four rows, it fits nowhere. You choose a row of your choice, take all the cards in it, and your card becomes the new first card of that row.

Cards you take go face down into your bull pile in front of you. They never go back in your hand. There is no recycling, no playing a card you have already collected, and no way to get rid of one. This is the only card game in our collection where the cards you lose are genuinely gone, and it is why the order you release them in matters.

When Rule 4 fires, the official rulebook’s own advice is to take the row with the fewest bullheads. Count bullheads, not cards. A short row holding the 55 is far more expensive than a long row of ordinary numbers, and choosing by row length is the most common bad decision at a beginner table.

How Many Bullheads Is Each Card Worth?

Every card has at least one bullhead printed at the top and the bottom, and each bullhead is one negative point. The values follow a pattern you can learn in about fifteen seconds, and learning it is the single biggest improvement available to a new player.

Card number pattern	Bullheads	Cards in the 104	Which cards
Most cards	1	76	Everything not listed below
Ends in 5	2	9	5, 15, 25, 35, 45, 65, 75, 85, 95
Multiples of 10	3	10	10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100
Doubles	5	8	11, 22, 33, 44, 66, 77, 88, 99
The 55 only	7	1	55, and it is the worst card in the deck

The 55 is the only 7 bullhead card in the entire deck. It is both a double and a number ending in 5, so it collects two penalties at once, and a row holding it costs at least 7 points. This is the single number a new player needs and it appears in none of the top ten results we read for this review.

One printing note, and we would rather say this than have you quote us for it. Some English language printings of this game also print vegetables on the cards, with a bonus of one extra bullhead if the row you take holds all five different vegetables. We could not find that rule in the current official Amigo English rulebook, which lists only the four patterns above plus the 55, and we read four official English rulebooks in full to check. If your copy has vegetables printed on it, read the scoring box in your own rulebook before you play that rule.

When Does 6 Nimmt End?

The round ends when all players have played all 10 of their cards. Everyone turns their bull pile face up, counts the bullheads, writes the total on the paper, and the cards are all gathered and reshuffled for the next round.

The game ends when a player has reached 66 points or more, checked at the end of a round, not mid turn. The player with the fewest total bullheads wins. Nobody is eliminated and nobody is out of the game; reaching 66 ends it for everyone.

Ties are shared. If more than one player finishes with the fewest points, those players share the victory. The official English rulebook states this plainly and almost nobody mentions it.

You can agree to a different target score or a fixed number of rounds instead, and a lot of families do play two rounds and compare totals, which is a much calmer ending than 66. Category 5, the Hurricane themed English edition, uses 74 as its end score rather than 66, so if you own that box, read its rulebook.

How Many Players Is 6 Nimmt Best For?

The box says 2 to 10 and the honest answer is that it is a different game at every count, which is both the selling point and the reason couples should skip it.

Six players is where we would put the box. Enough cards hit the table each turn that predicting anyone is genuinely hard, but few enough that you can still roughly track which numbers are gone.

Two players is the weakest count and the one to be honest about. Only two cards land per turn, rows fill slowly and predictably, and the guessing that makes the game work largely disappears. It is completely playable and it is a shadow of itself. The printed Pro Variant for 2 to 6 players exists partly to fix this: it uses only the number of cards equal to players times 10 plus 4, all face up, and players pick their own ten, which turns the game into arithmetic instead of guesswork. If you own a copy with a Pro Variant in the rules, that is the two player version.

Ten players is the party trick and a good one. Nothing else handles ten without becoming a slog, and this handles it in the same half hour. The skill component thins out at that count, which is exactly right for a table that wants a laugh rather than a duel.

If you are choosing a game for a specific headcount, our best board games for 4 players guide breaks down where luck and skill sit, and it is worth reading before you assume 6 Nimmt is the answer, because it is a strong one at four and a mediocre one at two.

Our House Strategy, Not Official Rules

Everything above is the printed game. This part is what we actually do at the table, and none of it is in any rulebook.

1. Get rid of your lowest cards first. A card too low to fit any row forces you to take a whole row of your choice, and rows are cheapest in the first two turns. Hold a 4 until turn nine and you will pay for five cards instead of one.
2. Count what is gone before you commit. There is only one copy of each number. If nothing in the 30s has hit the table and you hold a 34, it is far safer than it was on turn one, because the 31 that would have undercut you is in somebody’s discards.
3. Lead with your doubles and your multiples of ten. 11, 22, 33 and 20, 30, 40 are the cards you most want to leave behind while rows are short and cheap. A 55 in your hand on turn ten is a disaster you can plan around on turn one.
4. Play just below the crowd, not just above. Because cards resolve low first, being the lowest card in a popular range lets you slot in before everyone else piles onto the same row.
5. Take a cheap row on purpose. If you hold a card that fits nowhere and one row is sitting on 4 bullheads, eating it deliberately beats being handed a full row of 17 two turns later. The trick is it has to be cheap.
6. Remember the sixth card is the dangerous one. It resolves last, after everyone else’s card in that range is already down. If two people are going for the same gap, the higher one is the one who pays.
7. Do not hoard your highest cards. Late in a round the high end is where everyone is forced, and the person left holding 95 is the person taking a row.

Is 6 Nimmt Just Luck?

No, and it is also not a pure deduction game, which is the claim we see most often and the one we would most like to fix.

The deal is real. Every player picks one card face down at the same time, and if the cards you are dealt are all low you will be taking rows regardless of skill. A single round can absolutely be decided by the deal, and anyone who tells you a good player cannot lose a round is wrong.

Skill decides the game. Over a full game to 66, which usually runs three or four rounds, the player who releases their low cards early and counts the table finishes with fewer bullheads. The randomness is in the deal, and the decisions are all yours.

6 Nimmt is not a pure deduction game. The deal is genuinely random and a single round can be decided by a bad hand, but skill decides the game across three or four rounds, because the only decision you make is which card to release and when.

The clearest way to see this is our guide to how luck and skill sit inside a game. 6 Nimmt is a pure input randomness game, the same family as Azul’s factory tiles, which is the most manageable kind of luck there is, because you get to choose what to do with whatever you were handed.

Is 6 Nimmt Good for Kids?

Yes at 8 and up, which is the age on the official rulebook, and the reason is that the only reading required is comparing two numbers.

The arithmetic is the easy part. A 7 year old can count to 104 and can work out which of two row ends is closer. What they cannot yet do is hold four things at once: their hand, the four row ends, the number of cards in each row, and what three other people might be holding. That is the real learning curve in this game, and it is a genuinely good one.

Alex at 7 plays it and wins more than he should, because he does the one thing adults find hardest, which is play low first without overthinking it. Our guide to quick games for short attention spans covers the other end of the table, where the problem is a child who will not sit still for 45 minutes. If the opposite problem is yours, a child who cannot lose gracefully, note that this game has no elimination and no direct attacks, so nobody is ever singled out as the loser. The 66 is a shared event.

What Is the Vegetable Rule and Should I Play It?

We have covered it in the scoring section, but it deserves its own answer because it is the most asked question about this game and the least documented.

It is not in the official current Amigo English rulebook. We read four official English rulebooks in full, including the 30th Anniversary edition, and the word vegetable appears in none of them. The scoring section is a closed list: 1 bullhead, 2 for numbers ending in 5, 3 for multiples of 10, 5 for doubles, and 7 for the 55.

It appears in some English language printings, on cards that show vegetables instead of, or alongside, the bullhead numbers. If your copy has them, the version we have seen described is one extra bullhead when the row you take contains all five different vegetables.

Our advice is to check your own box. Open the rulebook to the scoring page and see whether a vegetable clause is printed there. If it is, play it. If it is not, do not, and do not let a rules video on the internet add a point to your score that your copy does not have.

Do I Need the Expansions or Special Cards?

No. The base box is 104 cards and four rules, and it is a complete game that has been in print since 1994. Nothing in it is missing.

What the anniversary editions add is real but optional. The 30 Years Jubilee Edition adds 13 special fan cards created by fans for the 25th birthday, which change the placement rules, plus the cooperative Beat the Buffalo mode for 1 to 6 players and the only solo option in the family. The 25 Jahre edition adds 28 special cards, four each of Stop, Shift, Insert, Replace, Negative = Positive, 5th Row and 7 nimmt!, and turns the game into a two round format with twelve cards a hand.

There is also an official Pro Variant for 2 to 6 players in the anniversary rules, described in the player count section above, and the older English rulebook prints eight variants in total including Tactics, Logic, Tournament, Professional, Open, Nifty, Hand and Double.

Buy the base game. Add the Jubilee edition if you have already played this a lot and want solo, or want five to ten year olds to have something new. The older English rulebook’s eight variants are the cheapest variety available and they are already in the box you own.

6 Nimmt FAQs

How many players can play 6 Nimmt? Two to ten in the base game, and the game is genuinely different at every count. Two is the weakest because rows fill predictably, six is the sweet spot, and ten is the party trick. The 30th Anniversary edition adds a cooperative mode for one to six players.

How long does a game of 6 Nimmt take? About 45 minutes on the official rulebook, and our games finish nearer 30. A round is exactly ten turns, and a full game to 66 is usually three or four rounds. Adding players barely changes it, because everyone plays at the same time.

What age is 6 Nimmt suitable for? The official English rulebook says 8 and up. The rules only need comparing two numbers, so younger children can play, but holding your hand, the four row ends and three opponents’ ranges at once is the real skill, and that arrives around 8 or 9.

How do you win in 6 Nimmt? By having the fewest bullheads when someone reaches 66 or more. You win by taking as few cards as possible, which is the opposite of how most card games work. If two players tie on the lowest score, they share the victory.

What is the highest value card in 6 Nimmt? The 55, at 7 bullheads, and it is the only card in the deck with 7. It is both a double and a number ending in 5, so it collects both penalties. Doubles such as 11 and 22 are worth 5, multiples of 10 such as 20 and 30 are worth 3, numbers ending in 5 are worth 2, and everything else is worth 1.

Can you play 6 Nimmt with two players? Yes, and it is the weakest count. Only two cards land each turn, so rows fill slowly and the guessing disappears. The printed Pro Variant for 2 to 6 players fixes this by using a small known deck, cards face up, and players picking their own ten.

Is there a vegetable rule in 6 Nimmt? Not in the current official Amigo English rulebook, which we read in full across four printings. Some English language printings put vegetables on the cards and add one bullhead when the row you take holds all five different vegetables. Check the scoring page of your own rulebook before playing that rule.

Do I need the expansions to play 6 Nimmt? No. The base box is 104 cards and four rules and it is a complete game. The 30 Years Jubilee Edition adds special fan cards and the cooperative Beat the Buffalo mode for one to six players, and the 25 Jahre edition adds 28 special cards in a two round format. Neither is required.

Can you play the cards you take in 6 Nimmt? No, and this is the rule that trips people up. Cards you collect go face down into your bull pile and stay there until you count them at the end of the round. They never return to your hand, so there is no recycling and no way to get rid of a bad card once you have taken it.

The Verdict on 6 Nimmt

6 Nimmt is a 1994 card game that has never needed a sequel to be good, and that is the whole compliment. Four rules, 104 cards, no board, no setup, and a decision you make ten times a round that is really one question: which of my cards do I let go of first.

Two things to know before you buy. You are playing to lose points, not collect them, and that inversion trips up more first timers than any placement rule. And two players is a bad fit for this game, so if it is a couples shelf, look elsewhere. Our best board games for couples guide is where we send people who want a two player game that actually plays like one.

If you want the same job done with more noise, P for Pizza is the other quick card game on our shelf and it is a very different kind of funny. And if the problem is a 45 minute commitment rather than a rules problem, 30 Seconds gets a whole game done in a quarter of that.