Fingerbones

Fingerbones is the game skeletons play when humans are all asleep. Skeletons are simple creatures, so it's a simple racing game... no randomization, no complex rules, just a single card that you can keep tucked in your ribcage, and a tense game of bluffing and double-bluffing that you only need five fingers to play.

Players simultaneously reveal how many spaces they want their skeletons to move; unfortunately, skeletons are too boneheaded to move at the same time, so if any players picked matching values, they don't move at all. This makes it a game about out-thinking your opponents; do you pick a high number to move your skeleton quickly, or is it safer to pick a lower number so you're less likely to get stuck in your tracks? Ah, but if it's safer to pick a lower number, isn't everyone going to do that? Doesn't it make more sense to try for five steps after all?

Each game takes less than five minutes, and all you need are tokens for each player (coins work great for this, if you don't happen to have colored pawns or glass beads close at hand). And if you have a couple six-sided dice, there is even a rule for simple AI players, robot skeletons, for two-player or even solo mode.

And of course, because the economics of buying one card and nothing else are so wildly out of whack, the full text is available for free in the action shots below, or as a downloadable PDF over to the right.