Base price: $23.
2 – 6 players.
Play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2

I can’t believe it; I’m almost done with my writing for the week and it’s Friday. Something in the water, I think? Some kind of out-of-body experience? Who knows. But I’ve also been plugging away on the website all week adding new pages and hubs to try and make games more discoverable on my website. If you’re interested, check them out! I’m trying to organize games that I really enjoyed playing and reviewing to make the 1300ish (maybe more?) reviews easier to find and read through. I’m probably most excited about my Great First Board Games hub or my Puzzle and Mystery Games hub, but those are both things I’m very enthusiastically writing about. Maybe Petiquette is bound for one? Let’s find out!

In Petiquette, you’re all about what is proper and best. What’s more proper than a properly finished sequence? Nothing you’re aware of. But these dogs and cats and geese and hats and numbers; they’re all so messy. It’s hard to agree. Naturally, anyone who agrees with you is a genius, but you don’t want to be the embarrassed person left out, so maybe your idea of a perfect pattern needs to be adjusted a bit. Look at the sequence, decide what’s missing, and hope that you’re not alone. Simple, right?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

Pretty easy! You’re going to set the Question Card near the other cards:

Each player gets a number wheel and a set of pattern cards:

And then set the round tokens below the deck area:

Set the score tokens nearby.

Shuffle the deck, draw five, and then shuffle them with the Question Card. Reveal all six in a row and you’re ready to start round 1!

Gameplay

Petiqutte is a game all about patterns and pattern-matching. Unfortunately, you never know quite where the pattern is going to be broken up.

For the given set of six cards, each round, one card will be the Question (?) Card. Those six cards collectively form what’s called the sequence. Each player decides what combination of animal, hat, and number makes the sequence make the most sense. You can also decide what makes it the prettiest or coolest or most fun; there’s really no rules here. Well, there is one rule: any card that appears in the sequence cannot be played again by players. But how do you play a card?

You have a set of nine Pattern Cards (one of each animal + hat pairing) and a number wheel. You’ll choose a number and place it with one of the Pattern Cards to form a card of your own for submission, playing it face-down. Once everyone’s chosen one, reveal them! If you played the same card as anyone else, you score! You get 1 point in rounds one, two, and three and 2 points in rounds four and five. Note that you do not get more points if more people match with you! It’s a very binary state. The game encourages (and I agree) players to share why they played the card that they played. It’s fun and it kind of makes me feel like I get to know someone else better. After everyone’s explained, set aside the Question Card, discard the played cards in the sequence, draw five more, shuffle the Question Card in, reveal them, and start the next round.

After the fifth round, the player with the most points wins!

In the cooperative mode, each player takes a turn filling in a pattern and the other players have to collectively guess what they played. Feel free to discuss and see if you can get it right!

Player Count Differences

Generally speaking, the game gets easier with more players. With more players, there are more potential people to match with each round, so your odds of scoring are a little bit higher. At two, you really have to get lucky and match up perfectly (unless you’re playing the alternate cooperative mode). At six, well, you can still be completely wrong; it just feels worse. The nature of the beast, I suppose. But in all seriousness, beyond that, the player count isn’t a huge deal. I think the game takes a little longer with more players, as well, but that’s mostly because with more players, we usually make everyone explain why they picked what they picked, so each round takes a little bit longer as well. I think it’s more fun this way, and my group agreed, so here we are. As a result, slight preference for higher player counts, but just slightly. I actually think this would be a pretty interesting game to play on a date, especially if you just keep playing until you match, rather than playing with points or anything like that.

Strategy

• Listen to other players’ justifications. I think it’s fun to hear people explain why they picked what they picked, and you get to learn about how their brain works. Isn’t that, in it of itself, a victory? But in all seriousness, hearing how they think and what they look to emphasize can help you play more to their taste in future rounds. Are they tending towards prioritizing the animal? Do they look for symmetry or just chaos? Things like that.
• Do math at your own risk. I saw a player doing a lot of intricate subtractions to choose a number and it didn’t really work out for them (or me, the one time I tried it). It may be better to just go off of vibes and see what happens.
• Keep in mind that certain options are illegal to play. You cannot play any card that already appears on the table in the sequence; every card must be unique. Keeping that in mind is critical and might help you make some adjacent plays that are still obvious because they’re the only valid play left in the sequence.
• Occam’s Razor will save you a lot of time. Sometimes you just want to turn off the analytical part of your brain and make a guess based entirely on vibes or the first thing that pops into your head. Both are sometimes the right move! You might even get points, depending on the other players.
• I find that numbers are often the most difficult thing to match on. There are more numbers than types of hats or animals, in the silliest and simplest sense, but because of that the span of what number makes “sense” in a certain spot can be a lot trickier for some players (and me!). Sometimes you get lucky and it’s obvious, but plenty of times you’ll be rolling the dice.
• Matching becomes more valuable as the game goes on, so don’t worry if the first couple rounds are a bust. You should care a bit if one player is always matching and you’re not, or if you haven’t made a match and it’s round 4, but you can see some players come from behind in the last two rounds, as they’re worth more than the first three rounds.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• The art style is fantastic. It’s animals with fancy hats; if you tell me that you’re not at least a little amused by it I’m calling you a liar.
• I really like this as a social game? What I like about it is that you can play it with as little or as much thought as you want and it’ll still play about the same. It’s silly and quick and there’s a lot of opportunity to listen to other players talk about what they thought it was going to be, and I think that’s really cool. Like I said earlier, I think this would make a pretty neat date night game as well, just to listen to someone else’s perspective and slowly see if you can align on how the sequences play out.
• The cooperative variant is pretty cool as well. There, players all work to try and guess one player’s choice for the sequence, so you can talk and discuss and reason out what they might have picked and why. Another great way to see how well your friends know how you think.
• Plays very quickly. Super fast! Under 20 once everyone has the hang of it.
• It is fun to make fun of the player who didn’t match with anyone, if there’s only one. It’s hurtful and a little mean but also very funny, mostly because of, again, how arbitrary the decisions feel sometimes. You still feel like a genius when you match with someone else.
• Matching is also very satisfying. It plays a lot like Medium, a fantastic word party game where players get two different words and have to try and say the same word (usually the word in the middle of the two). Here, it feels like you really got the other player, which is cool.
• Make players explain their choices! It’s fun to hear how players’ brains work, especially if they come up with something either completely weird or absolutely brilliant. You get to know people when you listen to how they think through extremely arbitrary decisions, and this is about as arbitrary as it gets.
• I like how the gaming group starts to converge after a while. As people explain

Mehs

• The number attachment for the pattern cards can be a bit flimsy. There’s a trick to getting the number wheel to hook onto the pattern card, but it’s not a perfect science. I wish the little nub on the pattern cards had been just a bit longer to make it easier.

Cons

• Just mathematically, there are plenty of times that you’re completely incapable of winning, which never feels super fun. Kind of makes you wonder why there’s a scoring system at all, but thankfully, it’s a very short game so you only have a couple minutes to curse your bad luck before it’s over and you can play again, which is nice.

Overall: 8.5 / 10

Overall, I was super pleasantly surprised with Petiquette! Sometimes Oink just hits it out of the park with some of their published designs, and this is an excellent one for their brand and right in their wheelhouse. Thomas Sellner did a great job and designed a game that lets you, the player, make a near-arbitrary decision, forces you to explain it to the class, and then rewards you in the off chance that your brain aligned with someone else’s. Similar vibe to other great party games like Medium and Wavelength, but on a much smaller scale, which is nice, too. I will freely say I had absolutely no idea what this game was going to be about when I opened it, so this was an unexpected delight. I have my own things about scoring, of course, but that’s common with a lot of party games. They’re often designed to crown a “winner”, but a lot of people playing them don’t care and are just playing for fun. Petiquette supports both ideologies (and a cooperative mode to boot!), so you don’t have much to worry about, there. And, given that it’s an Oink Games title, it’s extremely portable. Pocket, purse, backpack; whatever; you can hold it. I wasn’t expecting to add another game to my Social and Party Games hub so soon, but I gotta. I think Petiquette is a lot of fun, and if you’re looking for a great icebreaking game, a fun date night experience, or you just like animals with hats, I’d recommend checking it out! It’s a lot of fun.

For other great party games and games that are very portable, check out my Social and Party Games Hub and my Small-Box and Wallet Games Hub!

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