Norns is a T-shirt: the board is on the back and the pieces and rules go in the breast pocket, which Velcroes shut. Studio Graphix has apparently been making (non-game) T-shirts for some time, so I'll forgive them for it, but I don't find it very useful. It can't be easily stored with the rest of my games, the board doesn't lie flat well, and I wouldn't try wearing it, since the board is already starting to flake off the back— I hate to think what a few times through the washer would do to it. Studio Graphix claims they wanted something convenient for hikers and that didn't have paper being used on useless things such as a box. That's fine, but given that the thing isn't much good as a T-shirt, so we have to evaluate it purely as game packaging, I think that something less expensive could have been created. Anyway, the packaging doesn't really harm the game any, so I'll ignore it from now on. I just had to get that off my chest.
The board for Norns is a 9x9 grid. The top and left edge spaces are numbered 0-8. The remaining 64 spaces are numbered according to the possible throws of two 8-sided dice: 11, 12, etc., up to 88. The other components consist of two different-colored 8-sided dice and 80 translucent markers in four colors.
On the first and every odd turn, each player throws the dice and places a marker on one of the spaces thus indicated (or the space, if doubles are rolled). If one of these spaces is occupied by his or her own marker, the other must be chosen. If both are so occupied, the player may place the marker according to the rules for even turns. If a space is occupied by an opponent's piece, the player may play on that space; the opponent's marker is removed.
On the even turns, each player places a marker on any empty space (this is how the single-digit spaces get occupied).
Whenever a marker is placed so that two of a player's markers sandwich two of the same opponent's markers, the opponent's markers are removed and the player has the option of "gazorping"— sliding one of his or her markers one space into the gap. Several of these removals can occur at once (although the sliding cannot trigger another one).
The object of the game is to get five markers in a row in any direction, or four in a row in the four-player game.
So, how does the game play? It's not too bad. It moves quickly and some strategy is evident. However, it has nagging flaws. The game lacks just about any flavor or color whatsoever, which ordinarily I wouldn't mind, since it's an abstract game— most abstract games are like that, so I don't generally regard it as a weakness. Norns, though, just has too much luck to be a "proper" abstract strategy game. I'm not an abstract fanatic— I like abstract games well enough but they're not my favorite type and I actually tend to like games with some random elements. In Norns, after ten moves or so all players will probably have several places where particular die rolls will win them the game instantly, and the first player will likely have a few more where other die rolls will win him or her the game in one more turn (all the other players will be able to do before the first player's next free move comes up is hope that one of them gets a lucky roll to block the play). Unfortunately, I don't see any obvious fix for this problem.
I suspect that this is another one of those games that we're not playing the same way as the designers do - by which I mean playing style rather than rules. The designers were very surprised that we ran out of markers in the two-player game, and insisted that we must be misinterpreting the rules. I will repeat for their benefit that it is quite possible to run out of markers in the two-player game if at least one player is playing defensively (so that the other can't gazorp his or her markers). It's possible that if we played it enough, our playing styles would evolve so the random moves would not have such a large effect. I don't really think that this would happen, though, and anyway, after we played enough two-player and four-player games to get a feel for it, no-one that I tried it with wanted to play it again. It's not a terrible game, but it doesn't have that much to recommend it over other, similar games.