Can you predict what another player will play? Petiquette is a rules-light pattern recognition game that rewards you for predicting what other players will do. Each correct prediction scores you points. The player with the most points at the end of 5 rounds wins.
Like I said the gameplay is simple with easy-to-follow rules. Each player gets nine cards showing different animal-hat combinations (dogs, cats, and ducks wearing blue, red, or yellow hats) and a number wheel. In each round, six cards are laid out face up in a line with one gap marked by a "?".
Your job is to fill that gap. You play a card from your hand, assign it a number using your wheel, and hope at least one other player suggests the exact same combination. Match someone and you both earn points. Play something already in the lineup or don't match anyone, and you get nothing.
Can you predict what another player will play? Petiquette is a rules-light pattern recognition game that rewards you for predicting what other players will do. Each correct prediction scores you points. The player with the most points at the end of 5 rounds wins.
Like I said the gameplay is simple with easy-to-follow rules. Each player gets nine cards showing different animal-hat combinations (dogs, cats, and ducks wearing blue, red, or yellow hats) and a number wheel. In each round, six cards are laid out face up in a line with one gap marked by a "?".
Your job is to fill that gap. You play a card from your hand, assign it a number using your wheel, and hope at least one other player suggests the exact same combination. Match someone and you both earn points. Play something already in the lineup or don't match anyone, and you get nothing.
The Real Game Is Reading Your Friends
After a few rounds, something clicks. You start noticing how the other players think. One player always looks for symmetry. Another hunts for number sequences. Someone else ignores the hats entirely and only cares about the animals.
During my experience with the game, one player revealed that he’d imagine additional cards beyond the lineup to help him identify patterns - as if we were in a Christopher Nolan movie.
On the surface, Petiquette appears to be about identifying the pattern among the random cards, in truth, it’s about predicting how the other players process and organise information.
The whimsical theme (seriously, ducks in top hats) combined with that psychological layer creates something that sticks with you. You finish a game with a new sense of how your friends view the world.
Two Modes In One Box
The game comes with rules for both Competitive and Cooperative modes.
Competitive mode works best with four to six players. That's when the probability of someone matching your suggestion stays high. With fewer players, you can go entire rounds without a match, which gets frustrating and results in a low-scoring game.
Cooperative mode is where this game really shines. One player (the Lead) submits a suggestion facedown while everyone else tries to read their mind. It's tense and collaborative. I'd recommend 2–4 players for this mode. The Lead player cannot communicate lending Petiquette the non-verbal elements of The Mind and The Crew, while encouraging communication between the non-Lead players as they submit one suggestion as a team.
The default cooperative rules ask you to match five rounds in a row to win, which can feel impossible depending on your group, and the luck of the draw.
As a solution to this, I've made the house rule that you can use one of the points you score between rounds to get the Lead player to reveal one piece of their suggestion - either the animal, the hat colour, or number.
Personally, this has made the cooperative mode more enjoyable and adds an element of strategy to the game. I also added a new scoring system for the cooperative mode, rewarding teams for using their points for clues, sparingly.
7 points = hive mind,
5-6 = great minds,
3-4 = syncing up,
1-2 = work in progress,
0 = have we just met?
One Real Gripe
The number wheel overlaps your card to mimic the lineup card layout. While I understand this is important for Oink Games' tiny boxes, as it minimises game components. In practice, it can be annoying. I’ve found the wheel rotates when you flip your card over, accidentally changing your number. The cards can also get bent from the overlapping of the number wheel.
[Wheel and card]
The Verdict
I'm a fan of The Mind, the silent cooperative card game, but Petiquette may have replaced it for me. The concept takes longer to explain, but what you get is richer. The whimsical theme, the psychology of pattern recognition, and genuinely learning how your friends see the world adds something that The Mind doesn't have.
It's easy to teach, quick to play, and endlessly replayable because the game changes based on who's sitting at the table. If you enjoy social deduction and games where the strategy lives between the players rather than on the cards, this is worth picking up. Just manage your expectations about how often you'll actually match in competitive mode, and definitely try the cooperative version with that homebrew scoring system.
