Raptor

Each round, you and your opponent simultaneously play one card face-down from a hand of 3 (drawn from your asymmetric 9-card deck — raptor or scientist). Reveal: the lower-numbered card's player executes that card's special action; the higher-numbered card's player gets action points equal to the difference between the two values, spent on a fixed menu (move, attack, sleep tokens, fire). The cadence is read-your-opponent, commit-blind, watch-the-spread — a tense psychological rhythm closer to Stratego or Battle Line than to a card game.

Setup: scientists deploy on tile edges; mother raptor and 5 babies start central. Each round: (1) both players choose one card from their hand and play face-down; (2) simultaneous reveal; (3) lower-card player resolves their card's special ability text; (4) higher-card player spends (high - low) action points on standard movement/attack actions; (5) discard played cards; (6) if a hand is empty, retrieve discards into hand. Raptor wins by killing all visible scientists OR escorting 3 babies off the board edge. Scientists win by capturing 3 babies (via sleep+adjacency) OR knocking out the mother raptor with combined damage. Game ends when one win condition triggers — typically 8-15 rounds.

The core decision is which card to commit — a low card guarantees you trigger its action but cedes initiative points; a high card guarantees you get lots of action points but only if your opponent didn't also play high. You're double-guessing: 'they need their fire-card, so they'll play it low; I'll play just below.' Hand size of 3 means you can map the opponent's remaining cards once a few rounds pass, adding deduction to mind-reading. Action-point spend has tactical depth — splitting points across two scientists, choosing fire over movement, herding babies through chokepoints. ~3 reasonable cards to pick per round, but the meta-game makes the choice feel knife-edge.

Dominant skill is opponent reading and bluff modeling — predicting what your opponent must commit given board state and remaining cards. Second is asymmetric-side mastery: the raptor and scientist sides play radically differently, and reaching strong play requires learning each side's cards and tempo separately. Third is spatial/tactical positioning on the modular board — chokepoints, fire-line denial, baby-escape lanes. Memory is meaningful (tracking opponent's discard pile to deduce their remaining hand). Math is trivial. Weak players spam high cards for action points; strong players play sub-optimal numbers to weaponize information.

Two-player Jurassic Park standoff: one of you is a velociraptor mother sneaking five babies off the board, the other is a team of scientists with jeeps, fire, and tranquilizer guns. 30 minutes, knife-edge tension, every round a stare-down.

Vincent Dutrait illustrated, deliberately styled as a 1960s B-movie poster — saturated cover art, pulpy 'Jurassic Park meets Predator' framing. The two card decks use slightly different templates: the raptor side has wild jungle energy, the scientist side a cleaner mid-century-modern adventure-magazine feel. High visual identity, a key shelf-recognition asset.