Find the Pickle
- Board's Eye View
- Jun 14
- 2 min read
For some reason other members of the Board's Eye View team thought there was going to be something risquée about this pocket-sized game, but we can reassure you that it's possible to have games involving pickled gherkins, or bananas, without suggestive overtones. Team Custard Kraken's Find the Pickle is a case in point. It's a party-game-style draw-and-play card game with some pretty weird card captions and illustrations but really nothing that makes the game NSFW (Not Safe For Work).
There's a deck from which each of the 3-6 players is dealt a starting hand of three cards. The cards all have an instruction/effect on them, typically involving card or hand manipulation. For example, a card may tell you to draw three more cards, take one and return the others to the deck, or, as an another example, it may require all players to pass a card to the player on their left. One card is the Pickle, and the object of the game is to be the player who is holding the pickle card when there are no cards left to draw or play.
On your turn you draw a card and you can play up to two cards and follow their effects. At first, it's distinctly possible that nobody holds the Pickle card but as the game continues, more cards are drawn and the draw deck runs down, players' suspicion increases about the Pickle card being out there and about who might have it. There are cards forcing involuntary swaps of individual cards and of whole hands, and there are cards that counter the effect of a card that's just been played. The use of these will inform the process of deduction and will likely trigger targeting.
Play continues after the draw deck has run out and until all the cards in hand have been played but, by the time the draw deck has been exhausted, players will be pretty certain who holds the Pickle, so winning depends on whether you have the cards in hand to snatch it and hold onto it. It all makes for a light, chaotic, tongue-in-cheek, filler-length game.
