In Scout, a fast-paced ladder-climbing card game for 2–5 players, you act as a circus leader recruiting performers to put on the ultimate show. The game’s defining twist is that you cannot rearrange your hand of cards once they are dealt; instead, you must work with the existing order, though you can choose to flip your entire hand upside down at the start of a round to use the cards’ alternate values. On your turn, you either “Show” a stronger set or run of adjacent cards to beat the current performance on the table or “Scout” a card from that display to add to your hand, strategically placing and orienting it to bridge gaps in your sequences. The round ends when a player empties their hand or a performance goes unbeaten, with players scoring points for captured cards while losing points for those left in hand.
The game has surprisingly deep strategy despite having very simple rules. It was a finalist for the prestigious Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in 2022!