Designed by: Masato Uesugi
Durian is a game of – wait for it – delivering groceries to jungle animals. As the clerks in the busy jungle shop, your goal is to fulfil orders. To fulfil orders you need to be sure the shop has enough inventory. The catch? You can’t be sure how much inventory the shop has.
Everyone starts with a single fruit card in front of them showing a number of fruit of different kinds. Collectively, these cards make up the inventory. However, you can only see everyone else’s card and not your own, so your knowledge is imperfect. Nobody can see their own card!
On your turn you have two choices. The first is to draw a fruit card from the pile, and place it face-upon the table. This represents a customer order: the card is divided in half with two potential orders and you can choose which one you ‘accept’ by orienting the card a certain way (the other half is now disregarded). That’s the end of your turn, and the next player goes.
The critical question is can the players’ inventory fulfil the order cards that are slowly building up on the table. If you’re convinced (or at least doubtful enough) that they can’t, then instead of flipping a new order, you can ring the bell to summon the (gorilla) manager. At this point, the players see whether the fruit on their cards can cover the orders or not. If they can, then the player who rang the bell picks up minus points. If they can’t, the player who went before them gets the minus points instead, before a new round begins. The minus points are on the Angry gorilla tokens, and they’re arranged in a stack so the first player to pick one up gets minus one point, the next will get minus 2 points and so on. As soon as any one player hits minus seven points, the game will end and the player with the fewest minus points wins!
The only other thing to factor in are the three gorillas! These are mixed in with the fruit cards and don’t represent orders, but mischief-makers: asking that you flip an existing order over to it’s ‘disregarded’ side when revealed. If a gorilla card appears at the start of the game in someone’s inventory then they have a power that will activate once the bell is rung and the manager appears: cancelling certain orders, doubling certain fruit cards and so on.
More from fate than the other players, although they'll be the ones ringing the bell
Very low
Very low - it's just a matter of easy maths (what the other players have v what the orders demand) and trying to gauge what's on your own card. But beware of bluffs!
Very simple, very silly, and always impossible to predict
2-7
Players
8+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
I always have time for Oink games and if Durian isn't up there with Insider, A Fake Artist Goes to New York or Deep Sea Adventure for laughs and tension, it's still an easily-understood and diverting 20 minutes you can exit without a sense of regret. Ultimately, I don't think it has that more-ish factor Oink usually do so well; it hinges so much on that single if/but mechanic that playing it more than 2 or 3 times begins to feel repetitive, and the initial fun factor starts to fade a little.