Pugs in Mugs
Designed by: Laurie Blake,Stuart Lawrence
Pugs in Mugs is a little card game of collecting the titular pugs in their mugs. The first player to get a pug of each of the five colours wins.
Everyone is dealt a hand of Pug cards that are a mix of pugs in their five colours, and mischief cards. On your turn you pick a card from the deck, discard a card from your hand, and if the card you discard has a mischief action, you can take the action. It might be stealing a card from someone else (Gimme), grabbing a card you need from the discard pile (Dig), or the final mischief action (Surprise) you can play at any time, forcing someone to discard a card from their hand.
You can also cash in a set of three matching pug cards to grab the doggy objectives of pugs in mugs cards – these go face-up in front of you. But beware – anyone can discard all five coloured pug cards to steal a pug in a mug from you… As soon as any one player gets the fifth pug in their mug, the game ends and they are the winner!
Sam says
Exploding Kittens has inspired a series of games along similar lines, from Unstable Unicorns to The Emoji Game where cards do things and players play cards until X point occurs. People enjoy them for their simplicity, accessibility, brevity, and low-level chaos. All good qualities, but I’m going to hold my hands up and say I tend to find them pretty arbitrary-feeling. I don’t feel the decisions are interesting and after a first play or two the jolly humour evaporates. Unfortunately with Pugs in Mugs that sense of best-before-date elapsing arrives even earlier: it’s rather attritional, rather repetitive, and rather long-feeling, with ‘surprises’ that get old quickly.
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Take That!
Players can steal cards from each other, so there's a slightly combative element to proceedings
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Fidget Factor!
Low - turns are fast and the game plays quickly
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Brain Burn!
Low - your hand usually dictates what your options are, and the rules are very simple
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Again Again!
It's a card game, so destiny is largely wrapped up in how they fall into your hand - or not!
