Collect!

Collect! is a simple card game where you flip animal cards and try to get four of a kind. Unless you have an octopus. Or a lion. Or maybe a chameleon?

Setting up the game couldn’t be easier: shuffle the cards and divide them into two roughly-equal sized decks. On your turn you flip over the top card from either deck, and choose whether to keep it – placing it face-up in front of you in your ‘row’ – or putting it back onto either deck and taking a new card instead. When you add a card to your row, it must go at either end; you cannot place it in-between other cards. The goal is to have four cards of the same animal next to each other: do that, and you instantly win the round.

When you add a card, you also activate its special ability. For some animals this gives new ways to win: the lion lets you win by having lots of different animals in your row, the octopus rewards three pairs of animals (again, each pair must be next to its matching partner). For others you get an optional instant power: crabs let you move a card – yours or someone else’s – to elsewhere in the row. Hermit crabs give you an extra turn if you already have a crab. Monkeys you can swap with someone else’s card, crocodiles let you destroy a card, and parrots you can announce what card you’re going for and flip the top of either deck: if it’s the animal you called, you keep it along with the parrot. Keeping track of what cards people have put where on the decks is helpful! Finally the chameleon has no special ability as such, but is a wild card, so next to three of a kind it will make the winning fourth card (and can also help form a pair for an octopus victory). Chameleons are powerful then, but you can only ever have one of them: should you end up with a second they’re both discarded.

Discarded chameleons and cards ‘eaten’ by the crocodiles go to the bottom of either deck. Any other ‘rejected’ cards go back on top.

A round can be over very fast, and two rounds wins you the game. In the unlikely event a deck runs out, split the other deck into two. If all the cards run out – we’ve never seen this happen – the round ends in a draw.