Designed by: Brett J. Gilbert,Matthew Dunstan
Prey Another Day is a game of bluff, brinkmanship and table-reading. It’s also incredibly simple!
Each player starts with five animal cards: Bear, Wolf, Lynx, Owl and Mouse. These each have a number value; from the powerful Bear (1) to the timid Mouse (5). The animals hunt each other, and your goal is to either be last player standing because everyone else has been successfully hunted – or, once three rounds are over, if there is more than one player still in the game then those players compare the number value of their three played animals – and if that happens, the higher number wins. The obvious catch here is that the more powerful cards to hunt with have lower numbers!
Each round players simultaneously select a card and place it face down. Then someone calls out the first animal – the Bear – and any players who played the bear reveal it. If more than one person has the bear, nothing else happens and we move on to calling Wolves. But if only one person played the Bear, then the bear gets to hunt: they announce another of the other animals that they’re choosing to hunt, and anyone who played that animal must reveal it: they are immediately eliminated from the round!
Then the same process happens with the Wolf, Lynx and Owl before finally any Mice – assuming they’ve not been hunted – are revealed. The played cards remain out on the table and all surviving players start the process again – except this time of course, they have one less card to choose from and everyone can see what they’ve already played. When a round ends the winner gets two points. If there’s more than one person still involved after three rounds then second-placed also gets a point. As soon as someone reaches five points, they win!
We're eating each other!
Very low - unless you're knocked out of a round. In which case, it's still pretty low!
Nothing to overly tax anyone, bar a little maths in round three.
Prey Another Day's appeal isn't about masses of variety, but the juice of sly interaction.
3-5
Players
8+
Years
5-15
Mins
Sam says
Some may find Prey Another Day a little one-note, offering nothing else around its core concept of table-reading and bluff - it's like poker without the betting, and the betting in poker is part of how you read the game. But like Cockroach Poker the core idea is still strong enough if players like it enough - and even if you don't it takes an inoffensive five minutes to play. I'd probably choose other bluffing games - Cockroach Poker, for instance! - over it, but I still enjoy this one and would happily play if asked.