Stupid Ra Trick

The one thing the game board does not include is a list of the starting tiles. To avoid trips to the rulebook, there's an easy way to remember who gets what: make a grid.

The following grids show the 3, 4, and 5 player tile distributions. All you really have to remember is to:

1. Start with 2.
2. Count down in all but the last column.

3 Players

4 Players

5 Players

The layout of the grid is simple: the number of players equals the number of rows. Starting with the number 2 tile and incrementing by 1, place the first tiles in each row. For example, for a four-player game, put down 2, 3, 4, and 5 in the first column. Repeat this process for a second column. For the last column, continue incrementing the count, but start the column from the bottom row and count upwards. In a 4 and 5 player game, make 3 columns (3 tiles per player). In a 3 player game, make 4 columns (4 tiles per player).

The following image shows a five-player game setup.

One last note... there are exactly 30 Ra tiles in the game. This means that in a 5 player game, there are exactly the number of Ra tiles as there are spaces on the Ra track.