Designed by: Laurie Blake,Stewart Lawrence
Pugs in Mugs is a funny 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!
Players can steal cards from each other, so there's a slightly combative element to proceedings
Low - turns are fast and the game plays quickly
Low - your hand usually dictates what your options are, and the rules are very simple
It's a card game, so destiny is largely wrapped up in how they fall into your hand - or not!
2-5
Players
6+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
Exploding Kittens inspired a series of games along similar lines, from Unstable Unicorns to The Emoji Game (and before Exploding Kittens there was rules-constantly-change Fluxx), where cards do things and players play cards until X point. A lot of people enjoy them for their simplicity, accessibility, brevity, and low-level chaos. And while I would agree those are good qualities for a game, I'm going to hold my hands up here as a Miserable Old Fart and say I always find them pretty arbitrary-feeling. There's nothing inherently bad about Pugs in Mugs; it's just that this type of game doesn't engage me - I don't feel the decisions in them are interesting and after a first play the jolly humour evaporates. But that's just me, and if you're after a very easy-to-play family game - with pugs - then you can probably add another star to our rating.