Critters
Draft insects each round, keep one, pass the rest. Build a collection that scores. Push your total too far and your cauldron explodes.
What is Critters?
Critters is an insect-drafting game where everyone builds a personal collection across multiple rounds. Each round, a hand of insect tiles is drawn and passed around the table. Keep one, pass the rest to the next player. Over time your grid fills with ladybugs, bees, beetles, fireflies, wasps, and more, each contributing to a score tallied at the end.
Insects aren't just passive counters. Some interact with tiles inside your own grid. Others reach across the table entirely, stealing tiles, blocking spaces, or destroying what someone else carefully built. A well-timed mantis or cuckoo bee can flip the standings in a single move.
The Point of the Game
Score the most points from your insect collection without overflowing your cauldron. Every bug adds to your total. Powerful insects add a lot, which is exactly the problem. Cross the threshold and your cauldron explodes, and you pay for it.
The player with the highest final score wins. Balancing ambition against restraint is the whole game. Chasing one more high-value tile is tempting right up until it isn't.
How It Works
- Before the first round, everyone votes on difficulty. Easy gives 13 grid slots, medium 16, hard 19. The harder the setting, the more tiles you'll need to fill and the more choices you face each round.
- Each round, a hand of insect tiles is drawn from the shared supply. Every player picks one tile to keep and one to pass to the next player in the rotation.
- Place new tiles anywhere in your personal grid. Some insects score based on what's next to them, so position matters.
- In the manage phase, powerful insects can be activated. Revealing tiles is a choice, not automatic. Some abilities trigger on reveal, and hidden tiles are harder for opponents to target.
- Players can propose tile trades at any point. Sometimes swapping a mediocre bug for something that disrupts a leader is worth more than its face value.
- When the supply runs out or grids fill up, everyone's collection scores. Highest total wins, unless your cauldron overflowed.
Good to Know
The Drafting Loop
Each round you decide fast: keep the best tile, or deny it to the player who needs it most. Passing something useful is sometimes better than keeping it.
Cauldron Overflow
Powerful insects push your score toward a threshold. Cross it and your cauldron explodes. The goal isn't to maximize your score. It's to maximize it without going over.
Insect Varieties
Ladybugs score by dot count. Bees come in drone, queen, cuckoo, and laying-worker variants, each with different effects. Fireflies have male and female variants that interact with each other.
Predators and Thieves
The mantis destroys an opponent's hidden tile. The cuckoo bee steals one and takes its score along with it. The spider blocks an empty slot. Use these well, or guard against them.
Hidden vs. Revealed
You choose when to reveal tiles in your grid. Hidden tiles dodge some abilities. Revealed tiles score clearly but become valid targets for predators and thieves.
Desktop Only
Critters needs a desktop or laptop. The grid management isn't suited to small screens. Everyone must be present at the start too. Joining mid-game isn't supported.
Your collection won't build itself. Pick your bugs.
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