Just Wild

In Just Wild players are different animals, fighting for dominance over a landscape created by domino-style card placement. Having the largest presence at the point when your cards run out is the objective!

Each player begins with a deck of their own cards and some animal tokens. Everyone lays a single card down on the table next to each other to create the play area and then the game kicks off wih everyone holding a hand of three cards from their own deck.

On your turn you have two options. The first – ideal – one is to lay one of your cards on top of already-played cards (it must be over two half-cards, not atop a single card), but to do this the number on your card must be the sum of the two numbers it covers up. For example, if there are a 4 and 3 next to each other on the table, I can play my 7 card over them.

If you can’t – or choose not to – play this way, then you must play a card face-down (also numbered!) onto the table in a way that expands the play area without covering anything. Another situation where this happens is if anyone wants to cover a number larger than ten: let’s say there is a 4 and an 8 adjacent (making 12), I can cover them up but it costs me two cards: a 2 over 4 and 8 and another card sacrificed face-down expanding the play area, representing the ten I needed to make twelve (in this instance the numbers on the back of the cards are ignored).

If the card you played has a baby animal on it as well as an adult, then you can optionally add a token onto it: this protects one-half of the card from ever being covered by other players (or yourself!) but beware, you only have five tokens to spend this way. At the moment your cards run out, you score a point for every half-a-card you have visible on the play area – even if other players subsequently cover them up, as everyone finishes at different moments. The player who scores highest is the winner.