Riffifi
Riffifi Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Components
- 60 chips (loot)
- 40 cards: 8 each in 5 different colours (yellow, red, blue, green, orange)
- 1 Officer card
- 1 rulebook
Setup
The 60 loot chips are placed in the middle of the table.
The Officer is not needed unless you use the variant (see Variants). The 40 cards are shuffled and dealt face down. With 4 or 5 players each player receives 10 or 8 cards respectively. In a 3-player game, four arbitrary 1s are set aside first. Each player receives 12 cards face down.
All cards are taken into hand. If a player is dealt five or more cards of one colour, the cards are redealt.
Gameplay
Playing Cards
The game begins. The player to the left of the dealer plays any card and places it face up in front of themselves on the table. Then the other players, going clockwise, each place one card of their choice face up in front of themselves. Only one card of each colour may lie face up at a time. If a second card of the same colour is played, the card with the higher value is turned face down.
Example: Narben-Ede places a blue 5 in front of themselves. Kletter-Max plays a yellow 7. Blondie plays a blue 2. Narben-Ede must immediately turn their blue 5 face down. Only after that does Lilly play their card. Each crook collects their turned-over cards in a face-down pile of their own.
Collecting Chips
The value of the played card shows how many chips the player claims. So a player who plays a red 4 has a claim to 4 red chips. However, they cannot collect them right away. They collect them only when the player comes up to play again one round later and the red 4 is still lying face up in front of them. Then they first take all blue chips from the middle of the table, and collect the missing 5 blue chips from the player who has the most blue chips. If two opponents have equally many blue chips, the player divides the loot as evenly as possible; for example, 2 blue chips from one opponent and 3 from the other.
Example: Narben-Ede may collect 7 red chips. There are no red chips in the middle. Kletter-Max has 6 red chips. Blondie and Lilly each have 3 red chips. Narben-Ede takes 6 red chips from Kletter-Max and then one chip from Blondie or Lilly.
If a player may collect 5 green coins but already has 10 green coins, they can of course collect only 2 more green coins. The remaining claim lapses.
Playing Cards (II)
Whoever is on turn must play a card. Passing is not allowed. Usually a player tries to choose a card with which they can turn over another card.
It can also happen that a player must turn over the card they have just played. For example, if a player is forced to play a red 7 while a red 4 is already lying face up on the table, the red 7 itself must be turned face down and set aside. It is also allowed to set the card aside immediately without showing it to the other players.
Collecting Chips (II)
When the loot is nearly distributed after several rounds, the crooks start to fight over it too. If a player may, for example, collect 7 blue chips but only 2 blue chips remain in the middle of the table, the player first takes all blue chips from the middle and collects the missing 5 blue chips from the opponent who has the most blue chips. If two opponents have equally many blue chips, the loot is divided as evenly as possible (see above).
Equal Chances
The cards are shuffled and dealt only at the start. After that, at the end of each round, each player passes their hand to their left-hand neighbour. That way everyone plays with every hand once.
End of Game and Scoring
The game ends as soon as all cards have been played and all claims have been collected. The number of chips each player has collected is credited to them as points.
The cards are then shuffled and dealt again. As many rounds are played as there are players in the game. The winner is the player who has collected the most chips in total.
Scoring Variant
After each round, each player notes the number of chips they have collected per colour. As soon as 7 or more chips of one colour have been collected, that colour is ticked off. Further chips of that colour are not counted, but they can still be collected, for example so that they do not fall into an opponent's hands. The winner is the player who, after several rounds, is the first to tick off all 5 colours.
The printed manual includes a blank scoring table ("Riffifi Scoring Table") on its last page: the five colours (yellow, red, blue, green, orange) as rows and the four named crooks (Narben-Ede, Kletter-Max, Blondie, Lilly) as columns, to be filled in during play. The example tallies on the printed page are hand-drawn tally marks and are not reproduced here.
The printed manual's example, as text: "Standing after 3 rounds: Narben-Ede needs only 2 yellow and 7 blue chips to end the game as the winner. If 2 players can tick off all colours after the same round, the winner is the one who collected the most chips in the last round."
Variants
The Officer
One arbitrary 1 (with four or five players) or 5 ones (with three players) are removed from the game. In their place the Officer card is added to the game. Whoever plays the Officer may turn over any face-up card. The Officer may be played only when it is one's turn.