Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
The beauty of the Allplay “Tiny Box” line is that the games are richly illustrated, easy to teach, come in a box typically sized for a deck of poker-sized cards, and wrap up in about 10 minutes.
Some of those games are good; in fact, I still think Rainbow is a sneaky-good game that didn’t get the love it deserved when released last year. A couple more Tiny Box releases hit my doorstep recently, including Slambo, a game that shares a ruleset shockingly similar to another game I tried this spring, 3, 2, 1 Piñata.
Both of those games ask players to manage a small hand of cards, start with a “count” of five in the middle of the table, then play cards to keep the count within certain thresholds to try and score. In Slambo, the goal is to not bust by driving the count below zero or above 10. If a player’s card drives the count outside of the 0-10 range, they must draw a shame card. When any player gains their third shame card, they lose and all other players win.
My kids loved this game and asked to play it over and over. The adults…did not.
Bring Your Family, Not Your Friends
The rules I detailed above really are all the rules. A two-player game of Slambo takes about five minutes, just like it says on the box, and is appropriate for a six-year-old. My eight-year-old beat me in one Slambo match three-zip, so I think he figured it out pretty quickly.
And that’s where I found the most joy with Slambo: my family. Games with my wife and two kids (ages 8 and 11) were the Slambo sweet spot. Not much thinking. Lots of yelling. (Strangely, no one ever gets to yell the word “Slambo”, which I think is a miss.) The kids adored the artwork provided by illustrator Sai Beppu, the woman who also gave Rainbow and Panda Panda life with bright and beautiful card art.
Later, I determined that Slambo makes for a great game for kids to teach and play with other kids, so I placed the game in our kitchen-area game bin alongside games like Exploding Kittens, UNO, and Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza. That’s important for a person who likes leaving kids to play on their own from time to time.
After doing five plays (!!!) of Slambo with my family, I broke out Slambo for my review crew. After just one round, I could tell we weren’t going to make it through a full game of Slambo. After three hands, we called it because one guy was giving me that “please, not another hand” look as I was shuffling cards.
The two other adults murdered Slambo. “I hesitate to even call this a game,” one player lamented. “It’s obvious that the goal here is to keep a balanced hand, play the largest number cards first, then hope someone else busts before I do. I would play this the same way every time.”
OK, fair; the game’s choices are limited. That’s the idea for a game that can be played in five minutes and bought for less than ten bucks! But the kids cackled as they stared at a card that looked like it featured two sumo wrestlers tickling each other. The kids asked to play this game before dinner multiple nights. That’s gotta mean something, right?
“I think this would be better if someone had to yell ‘Slambo’ when they win the round,” another adult player commented. “I’m also surprised the game features real-world sumo terms on all the cards, but uses the title ‘Slambo.’ It was going for authenticity on the cards but the title is basically “Ro-Sham-Bo!!’”
Marketing is a thing, right? And one of those adult players is an actual, real-life sumo nerd, so he was thrilled to see that the game used a sumo theme…then saddened when the game bailed on using a sumo term as the game title. Again, I get it—Slambo sounds like a game you should play, but “Hakkeyoi, Nokotta!” is a tough phrase to use as your game title in the BGG database. (That phrase is the term a referee says at the start of a sumo match, which is also used as the term on the start card of Slambo).
That said, I know Slambo’s place in the world, and that place is firmly as a family-only game in my collection. Pick this one up if you are looking for a fun gift for other gaming families in your network or looking for something quick that you can stash in your purse on your way to game night!
Slambo details
- Designer: Ryan "The Boulder" Richford
- Artists: 別府さい (Sai Beppu)
- Publishers: Allplay
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 2 - 4
- Age range : 6+
- Time range : 5 - 15 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Hand Management
- BGG Geek Rating: 6.60213 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Slambo.
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