Tucano

Tucano is a simple ‘set collection’ game of grabbing point-scoring fruits and adding them to your own collection of cards: the catch being that all of them score in different ways, depending on how many you have.

The cards are shuffled and a number dealt face-up in the centre of the table. The starting player chooses a card for themselves, and then each ‘column’ has another card dealt to it, before the next player chooses, and then more cards are dealt – with the caveat being that each column can hold a maximum of four cards. When you choose a column, you take all the cards in it. Mechanically speaking, that’s the entire game right there: when the cards run out, everyones fruit get scored.

Strategically speaking, which column you take depends on the fruits it has in it. Some fruit score more the more you have of them… but others score increasingly less. The guava, for example, can haul you in a whopping 20 points if you get four of them. Whereas pineapples will score nothing for one pineapple, but move into negative points for any more. Limes are even worse, making it seem like the designer has a particular dislike of citrus.

Once you’ve played the basic game you can mix in the Toucan cards for extra shenanigans, bringing players special powers like gifting an unwanted fruit to someone else, or taking a fruit from them. These make the game a bit more spicy.