The players must work their way out of town along a dark road, dealing with the threats they encounter along the way - which may or may not include their companion. | Image credit: Distant Rabbit Games

If you announce that you wish to score, draw the top card from the draw pile. Reveal and place it near your tank. A revealed card that matches the color of any card or cards in your tank allows you to score. Remove the revealed card and the matching cards and add them to your score pile. Did you reveal a new color that does not match? You cannot score. The revealed card is left in the tank. Once you begin to get more than one card of the same color, those cards are kept in a staggered column for all players to see. Play passes left. Creature Loot Tables also tend to have large amounts of 1% items, which is intended to make stealing more rare items harder, as the player is more likely to steal the large amounts of 1% items than a singular 50% item. Mantis is the Mario Kart of card games: a potential friendship ruiner. Some people might need a couple of minutes to cool off after intense betrayal. Some might need a couple of hours. Or maybe that is just specific to my friend group and we need to chill. Either way, the short nature of each round really adds to the fun, because hard feelings between players are going to be carried over into each game. What can I say? You were promised a cutthroat game! In each game of Mantis, players are challenged to earn a set number of points by making matches with the cards in their Tank.Once players decide how they are going to play on their turn, they flip over the top card of the draw pile. If they’re trying to score in their own Tank and they flip over a card that matches one or more cards in their Tank, they can move these matching cards and the card they drew to their Score Pile. If there is no match, the new card is added to the player’s Tank and their turn is over. Also, shout out to Exploding Kittens who has launched its Youth Program outreach in celebration of this new game. The company’s program provides select summer camps and youth organizations with Exploding Kittens games, free of charge. With nearly 1,000 games already fulfilled since January, the company will be adding Mantis to the expanded program to get games in the hands of more kids. ( Organizations looking to participate can join the waitlist.) If you have chosen to score and you do have cards that match the colour revealed, the card gets added to them and they are all flipped over to show the rainbow side. These then get placed underneath your area in your score pile. If you don’t have the matching colour, the card gets added to your area face up as another colour to be scored later (or STOLEN!).

If stealing, the colour must match cards in your opponent’s collection. When you get a match, you get to add those cards to your own collection. But when it doesn’t, that opponent gets to keep that card for themselves. Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge.

Side guide

If the player is trying to steal cards from another player and they flip over a card that matches one or more cards in the opponent’s Tank, they can steal the matching cards and place these cards (including the card they drew) in their own Tank. If the card they flipped over doesn’t match any of the cards in their opponent’s Tank, the opponent adds the card to their Tank instead. I do love a colorful game, but I love a colorful game that double-codes its colors for accessibility reasons even more. I appreciate them using symbols and colors together to avoid just using color as the primary way to distinguish cards. It’s a very, very basic accessibility fix, these days, but it’s still nice to see. Exploding Kittens, the company behind games like A Game of Cat& Mouthand Zombie Kittens, released Mantis, a colorful card game inspired by the mantis shrimp. Honestly, the simplicity of this game is very appealing. I really like that there are only two actions? It makes the game dead simple to teach other players, and it’s the kind of game that I could see my family actually playing with me (as opposed to the more overtly complex games that I love so much). It reminds me a bit of PUSH, in the “unexpected simple game that’s great within its niche” way. Winding up for a big Score can be how you win the game. I mean, if you can pull off a major Score action, that’s cool and all, and that can win you the game in a single turn. It’s just hard to do well, since as soon as you get enough cards, you become everyone’s target.

As the game progresses, score piles will grow. Players must keep their score pile staggered, and they must say the number of cards they have if asked. The first person to collect ten or more Mantis cards in their score pile wins the game immediately. This is a more advanced covering of the loot-table of Mantis. Each item has an independent chance and count, in which the chance is the chance it can drop and the count is the amount of items that have that chance. If a count larger than 2 is in one section, then each item has an independent chance from one another (EX: Instead of getting say 1-2 of a resource, you can get 1 with a 70% chance and another with an additional 70% chance). In terms of Stealing, it can take one item from every section of the loot table, so even if a item count is say 5, the player will only steal one from that section. Another module recommended for those with a grip on the basics promises deeper gameplay through unique player characters and more advanced action cards. I’m yet to dive into this properly, but I’m keen to: the base game has plenty to recommend it as it is. The last, Under the Rose, is billed as an even more in-depth variant, introducing agents that players’ characters can meet with along their journey, leaning further into its thriller trappings.Yeah, the whole mantis shrimp theme doesn’t really come through in the gameplay at all. I’m going to assume it’s one of those Oatmeal things that I don’t really get since I don’t actively consume the comic content. It doesn’t bother me in any way; it just doesn’t really have anything to do with the game proper. I like a weird theme, but I also like a weird theme that feels integrated into the gameplay in a way that matters, rather than just a weird theme for the sake of a weird theme. Though, I’ll freely admit that a weird theme for its own sake is still better than a boring one.