Petiquette
- Board's Eye View
- Apr 21
- 2 min read
Petiquette was one of the new releases from Oink Games at Spiel Essen 2025. It's a pattern recognition game that mimics the puzzles usually offered in IQ tests where you have to work out the next picture in a logical sequence. The USP here tho' is that the puzzle is set not by a logician but by pure chance: you and the other players will be trying to find a pattern in a sequence of cards that have been selected at random!
In Petiquette, Thomas Sellner has designed an easy-to-play party game for up to 6 players. You can play it with just two players but it's at its best at higher player counts. It's played over five rounds with a main deck of 45 cards showing a dog, cat or bird wearing a red, blue or yellow hat and with a number 1-5. Each round, one player draws five face-down cards, adds a question mark card, and shuffles them before laying all six cards out in a face-up sequence. They then use their individual set of player cards and a clip-on number wheel to indicate their best or preferred or most seemingly logical fit for what should go in the position of the question mark card (so could be at the start, end or partway through the 'sequence'). You can choose any combination but you mustn't duplicate any of the actual cards in the sequence. All the players similarly and secretly make their choices for a simultaneous reveal...
Players score if the pattern they choose exactly matches the choice of the player who laid out the sequence, and that player scores if at least one other player has matched their choice. To keep everyone in contention, the reward increases from 1 point to 2 points for matches in the fourth and fifth (final) round.
It's possible that the randomly selected cards will make a genuinely logical sequence - for example, regular rotation of dog, cat, bird and hat colours as well as numbers - but you'll probably be playing this game a lot before one of those sequences happens to appear. In reality Petiquette isn't an IQ puzzle but, as in games like Dixit, it's all about getting on the same wavelength as the player whose pattern you are trying to match with.
There's the option to play as a cooperative game. The player count for the competitive game is only limited to six players by dint of there only being six sets of player cards and number wheels. In our plays at Board's Eye View we've stretched the player count to seven by having the player who lays out the sequence simply announce their choice immediately before the other six players reveal the choices they have made. That works too.
Petiquette is distributed in the UK by Hachette Boardgames UK.
