by W. Eric Martin

For more than a decade, I used Diamant — a 2005 release from Bruno Faidutti and Alan R. Moon — as an introductory game when new people arrived at the meetup. Some of these folks were experienced gamers, bringing their own titles with them to play, while others were game enthusiasts with little experience outside of Scrabble and other mainstream releases.

Thus, Diamant — a game you can explain while playing that has a communal feel with everyone focusing on everyone else. (Bohnanza was the other intro game, although that took more time to explain before starting.)

If you're not familiar with Diamant, players are explorers going into caves to search for gems. You have to split the haul found on a cave card between all players still in the round, but those gems aren't yours to keep until you leave the cave — and you'll want to leave since threats keep popping up. As people leave, you get a bigger share of each haul found — but if a threat shows up a second time in a cave, then everyone loses all the gems they're holding. After five caves, whoever has the biggest haul wins.

In short, after each cave card is revealed, you ask yourself, "Should I stay, or should I go now?" Almost everyone gets the concept immediately, making the game an excellent ice breaker.

Wriggle Roulette, a 2025 release from Faidutti, Jun Sasaki, and Oink Games, has much the same feel as Diamant — something people have commented on after playing a round of the new game, despite not knowing about the Faidutti connection.

Each turn in Wriggle Roulette, you reach into a bag and grab 0-4 items (0-6 in a two-player game), with the bag consisting of black eels and red snakes in a 3:1 ratio. At the same time, everyone reveals what they grabbed, and if enough snakes are now showing — both in hands and on the table, with "enough" being based on the player count — then a snake outbreak takes place, with everyone who has the largest number of items in their hand losing everything and scoring 0 points for the round. All other players score 1 point per eel in their hand and in front of them, then if no one yet has 20+ points, you put everything back in the bag and start another round.

If a snake outbreak doesn't occur, you drop any snakes in your hand into a central pile, then keep all eels in front of you.

Thus, everyone builds a temporary stake (eels instead of gems) that they can lose by getting greedy and pushing things too far. As in Diamant, you can exit a round by having zero items in your hand. You're not putting yourself or anyone else at risk of a snake outbreak, so you get to score your eels and leave. In a neat twist from Diamant, in Wriggle Roulette a player who exits the round returns their eels to the bag, diluting the snake ratio and perhaps giving others an incentive to keep drawing.

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The Wriggle Roulette experience in two images from BGG.Spring 2025:



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The main difference between Diamant and Wriggle Roulette is that the danger of zeroing out a round comes from a deck of cards in the former and from player choices in the latter.

In Diamant, the chance of the next card being a second threat is something you can calculate before deciding whether to keep exploring or leave the cave. Other players' choices have no impact on what that next card will be; you're deciding based on fixed odds, as well as what you think your gem holdings are relative to everyone else.

In Wriggle Roulette, the round will end based on a mixture of chance and player choices. If everyone grabs a full hand of items, then the chance of a snake outbreak increases, so you might think that others will play it safe and draw out fewer items...so maybe you should fill your hand, trying to gain an eel or two on opponents at the risk of being the only one who doesn't score.

Or should you play it safe and lock in your points? Advance incrementally, or swing for the eely fences? As in Diamant, your choice will be affected by everyone else's point total. If an opponent is close to 20, then you'll likely want to keep going, even though that increases the risk of everyone failing.

So Wriggle Roulette increases player agency compared to Diamant, with everyone taking part in how the round plays out; the downside to that approach is that instead of everyone deciding at the same time whether or not to leave the cave, you need to pass the bag around the table so that each player can make their choice. The German efficiency of Diamant has been replaced by the French nature of refilling your glass and hanging around talking about love, life, and the risk of seeing too many snakes.

I've played Wriggle Roulette four times on a review copy from Oink Games, once each with 5-8 players, and I talk more about the gameplay experience in this video:

Youtube Video