Dicebreaker Recommends is a series of monthly board game, RPG and other tabletop recommendations from our friends at our sibling site, Dicebreaker. Check-out their full round-up of the best party games to play this Christmas.
As the holiday season approaches, everyone is looking for the perfect party board game to play with their friends and loved ones over the festive period. An ideal party game is one that doesn’t last too long, doesn’t require too much attention and is guaranteed to result in at least some hilarity. A card game that most definitely ticks all of these boxes is Cockroach Poker. I know, I know, it doesn’t sound like the kind of game that people would want to play during the holidays. After all, nobody wants to get involved with cockroaches or gambling when good food is being placed on the table.
However, just like a cockroach living underneath a fridge, the card game is a resilient creature that manages to stick around despite its simplicity and its size, and almost because of those factors. A bluffing game for up to six people, Cockroach Poker has players trying to palm the cards in their hand off onto others via false identification. What I mean is, you want another player to wrongly claim that the facedown card you’re giving them is a cockroach, when really it’s a spider.
There are eight different sets of cards in Cockroach Poker – cockroach, spider, toad, fly, rat, bat, stink bug and scorpion – with eight copies of each, meaning that there are 64 cards in total. The 64 cards in the game are dealt equally between everyone. Players then take turns giving a card of their choice to another player, which must be facedown and accompanied by a statement of what the card is. Players are free to tell the truth or lie, with the receiver then having one of two options: they can take the card and attempt to pass it off to another player or they can try to identify the card.