Petiquette is a quick playing small box from Oink Games with gorgeous art and excellent replayability. It’s all about looking for patterns in random sequences, and in many ways is like a distilled version of something like Mysterium, Codenames, or Wavelength. It’s very simple to set up and play and, like with the games I just mentioned, the fun and the challenge come more from trying to figure out how your friends think, rather than from the rules of the game itself.
How does Petiquette work?
You start by drawing five cards from the deck of whimsical, hat wearing animals, and shuffling in the question mark card. All six cards are then laid out in a row, and your job is to come up with a card that would best fit in the empty space. There are no right or wrong answers - you score points by having the same idea as another player. As such, the trick of the game is in trying to figure out how your fellow players think, and trying to replicate their logic to match their guess. The challenge (or one of them) is that they might be doing the same thing, with either you or another player, and then you’re back to square one and no one has any points.
One of the other challenges is the amount of possible options - each animal card, either a dog, duck, or cat, has one of three hats plus a number from 1 to 5. My group often found that we could work out some kind of logic for the animal and the hat, since there were only three options, but found it harder to decide on a sensible-sounding number. All of this leads to a strong “just one more go” feeling as you start to figure out how your friends’ weird brains work.
Do I need a big group of friends to play Petiquette?
No, but I think it works better if you do, at least for the main competitive mode. Technically the competitive mode plays 3-6 players, but something I ran into during three player games was that one particular friend and I had very similar logic, which thanks to the scoring rules made it feel more like the third player was losing, rather than us two winning. We also had a fair few rounds where no one got any points at all, which was a bit anticlimactic, and the chances of that happening dropped with four or more players.
However, Petiquette also has a cooperative mode that is mostly designed for two players but can be played at any player count (and that I would recommend over competitive for three
players). In this mode, you lay out your six cards including the question mark, and one player puts together their suggestion for the empty spot while the other(s) collaboratively try to guess what they picked. This feels a lot closer to the Codenames or Mysterium format, where everyone is working together to figure out what’s going on in one person’s head. There aren’t any hard and fast rules for scoring this mode, but check out fellow blogger Chris Ridley’s review for his neat homebrewed scoring system.
Anything else I should know?
Oink Games are wizards when it comes to packing lots of components into their trademark small boxes, and Petiquette is particularly impressive. You might have already done the maths and realised there are 45 different combinations of animal, hat, and number, and wondered how the game manages to fit six players worth of them in one tiny box. Well, the wizards at Oink Games have come up with a neat set of combinable cards that consist of nine base cards showing all the animal and hat combos, plus a little wheel with the five numbers that slots onto the top of the other cards.
These are a little fiddly, and I'm a little worried about how well they’ll hold up since you have to bend them slightly to get the number you want to show while hiding the others, but I've got to hand it to Oink for the ingenuity. The art itself is also delightful. Despite the game itself being quite abstract, the art and name has a very clear theme of well-to-do gentledogs etc. going about their business.
What’s the overall verdict?
Petiquette is a beautiful-looking game that, in my opinion, works best at higher player counts. It’s got both a competitive and cooperative mode depending on how you’re feeling, with the latter being the better option for two or three players. It’s a good warm-up game - quick and easy to set up and play - with great replayability given the randomness of the cards and often the randomness of your friends’ brains. Or at least the randomness of my friends’ brains.
