Setup

The website proposes “sets” of cards (ordered based on difficulty). For your first games, just pick one of those. Once you feel comfortable, you can assemble your own decks (see variants).

Ensure everyone understands all cards before the game starts.

Deal the deck until empty. It’s fine if some players have one more card.

Pick any player to be the “king”.

Objective

The game ends when everyone is out of cards. The player with the most points wins.

Gameplay

Rounds are played simultaneously.

• Everyone picks a card from their hand. (With 2 or 3 players, pick two.)
• Count down and simultaneously reveal them all.
• Based on the cards played, one of them will be “poisoned” (see next section).
• The first player to tap this card, wins the round! (Congratulations, you’ve saved the king’s life again!)

The winner adds all cards from the table to their score pile. The smasher of this round becomes the new king!

Any violation of the rules (such as tapping the wrong card) means you are out of the game. Distribute your remaining cards fairly over the active players.

• The interruption from a wrong guess makes it hard to continue fairly, so any violation ends the round instantly.
• Everyone plays with one hand. That hand both reveals their own card and smashes the poisoned food. Using the wrong hand is, of course, a rules violation.
• You can be softer and punish a wrong guess with only a temporary elimination (e.g. 4 rounds). In practice, however, without the threat of total elimination players will just smash instantly and carelessly—which ruins the game.

Finding The Poison

Each card shows a food item. It has a rule, a number and a type (animal, drink, vegetable, cereal, spice).

It’s your job to rapidly consider these rules and calculate which one is true.

1. Evaluate cards from low to high.
2. If multiple cards have the same number, only evaluate the one closest to the king (in clockwise direction).
3. If multiple are true, the card with the highest number is poisoned. Smash that!
4. If none are true, smash the center of the table.

Regarding rule 2: if multiple cards have the same number, the others still count! Don’t remove or ignore them. You simply don’t evaluate their power, which means they’re never poisoned.

Later sets contain “safe food”: they show a green checkmark. These are never poisoned themselves, but have a permanent rule that applies to this round.

Upgrades

Once you’re familiar with the base game, you can try these variants or expansions!

Assemble your own deck

You can use any cards you want! Below are some guidelines to help you.

• Use at least one card from every food category.
• Some cards have dependencies. (Examples: Cookie or Safe Food must be included.) Make sure to add those dependencies as well!
• Try to have unique numbers. (Max 2 duplicates per set.)
• Don’t include too many Safe Food. (Max 2 Safe Food per set.)

Additionally, you can control difficulty and game length.

• DIFFICULTY: Include more different cards to increase difficulty.
• GAME LENGTH: There’s often no need to use all cards of a type you want to include. Shrink the deck for a shorter game.

Variant: Blind Smashing

This is a fun variant to try.

Instead of holding cards in your hand, everybody has their cards as a facedown deck in front of them. Each round, everyone simultaneously draws and reveals the top card.

When you win a card, you stick it back into your pile wherever you want.

The last player who still has cards, wins!