Picanté

Pick the colour you least want. Then watch everyone hand it to you.

At the start of each round you choose your Picanté colour — the one you are trying not to collect. Every card of that colour you end up taking scores negative points equal to its value. Every other card is worth one.

The catch is that everyone has chosen a different colour, in secret, and the whole hand becomes a game of working out what each player is desperate to avoid and then making sure they get it.

This is Grail Games' edition of Sticheln, Klaus Palesch's 1993 design and one of the sharpest trick-takers ever published. It handles up to eight, which almost nothing in this weight class does.

Perfect for: Card players, and big tables that want something meaner than it looks.

3–8 players | 30–60 minutes | Age 10+