As one reviewer put it, this is a fun game of 'debatable interpretations'. If someone told you that the words 'leg' and 'limb' have the same meaning, would you challenge them? "Of course they're not!" you'd respond. "It's true that a leg is a limb; but so is an arm." What if they said that 'walking' and 'stationary' were opposites? You might reply that cars can be stationary, but you don't usually find them walking! So you would conclude that 'moving' is really the opposite of 'stationary', because it applies to things as well as animals.

This is the kind of lively, and often hilarious, debate that occurs when playing Nymble. The game is played in three rounds. In round 1, players try to make pairs of words with the same meaning (synonyms), with either one or both of the words coming from a randomly selected set of letters. In round 2, the pairs of words must have opposite meanings (antonyms); and in the last round, players are looking for pairs of words that sound alike (homonyms). The more word pairs they make, the higher their score could be. However, each round also includes a challenge phase, and the scoring reflects the success or failure of challenges as well as the value of word pairs. The player who ends up with the highest aggregate total after the three rounds is declared the winner.

Evaluated by 72 teacher teams from across the country, Nymble was among the few games to win the prestigious 2007 Teachers' Choice Award. Ruth Roufberg, one of the industry's most experienced game reviewers, concluded her review of the game with "My primary word group plays different games at each gathering - but Nymble is the only game they have ever insisted on playing again at the very next session".



No. of Players: 2-6
Ages: 10 and up
Playing Time: 30-45 minutes