MACAW

You are a family of macaws living in the menagerie of the sultan and your feathers all need a good preenin’ and cleanin’. You must work with the birds sitting immediately to your left and right to make yourself presentable to the sultan, who will reward the prettiest bird with a palm nut, your favorite food. You must help your neighbors preen their feathers too, because the sultan will not reward a well-groomed bird sitting next to an unkempt bird.

Prettiness is determined by the distribution of colors in your plumage. Having half the same color and the rest evenly split between a couple of other colors is best. The scoring formula rewards birds according to how close they come to the optimal ratio AND how well their neighbors optimize their feather color distributions. Finding the right balance of greed and altruism is as crucial as finding the right balance of colors.

First, each player blindly draws a few feathers from the bag. Then, the rest of the feathers in the bag are dumped in a pile in the center of the play area.

Next, players bid for the right to go first and choose the direction of play (clockwise or counter-clockwise), as these privileges give a competitive advantage.

On your turn, take two feathers from pile, giving one to yourself and one to the next player. Play continues this way until the center pile is exhausted, at which point everyone calculates their scores.

To earn a high score, you must optimize the distribution of colors in your own plumage as well as the next player's plumage. Though the mechanism of play is simple, the challenge lies in balancing your needs against the next player's needs, predicting your opponents' moves, and planning ahead as the number of available feathers dwindles and limits your options. And whatever you do, don't end up with just one feather of a particular color!

Now with a bigger box, palm nut-shaped tokens, and more feathers.