Himp the Minkey.
A sibling of Centripetal Bumble Bippy: same seven-card circle, same eights-wild rule, same colour arithmetic for building wilds. What changes is the geometry of which three circle cards you may use in your hand.
Rules below come from the 2024 onboarding doc, which is the table's own caveat-laden introduction to its games. The page is a draft; Jesse has not yet seen enough hands of this variant to know whether the geometric rule below admits edge cases I have not anticipated.
Setup
Identical to Centripetal Bumble Bippy: seven face-down cards in a centre circle, three cards per player (two face-down + one face-up), one additional face-down card dealt to each player after the circle is fully revealed. Standard house rules apply.
Wilds and combinations
Identical to Centripetal Bumble Bippy: eights are wild, and same-colour pairs add while different-colour pairs subtract, with a combined value of 8 producing a wild ("building to an 8").
What's different — the hand
Where Bumble Bippy lets you take any three consecutive cards from the circle, Himp the Minkey makes you take a specific geometric shape:
- two adjacent cards from the circle (any two next to each other), plus
- one circle card directly opposite that pair.
With seven cards in the circle, "directly opposite" is the card farthest from your chosen adjacent pair. You then build out the five-card hand using two cards from your own hand, exactly as in Bumble Bippy.
The effect of the geometry is to make the hand less constructable around any single hot stretch of the arc. Where Bumble Bippy rewards a localised cluster of useful circle cards, Himp the Minkey rewards a diametrical pairing — useful cards on both sides of the table.
Open questions in the notes
For a seven-card circle, "opposite" is unambiguous for any pair of adjacent cards — there are seven possible (pair + opposite) combinations to pick from. It is not yet established in the notes whether the pair has to be your own choice (you can pick which two neighbours), or whether the dealer assigns it. It is also unclear in the notes whether the colour-arithmetic combination rule applies to the three circle cards in any combination, or only between a circle card and a hand card.