After a heavier game has wrung everyone out, you want something light to close the night, and there's a new option you can try without spending a penny. Collect!, CMON's quick animal card game, has just landed on Board Game Arena, free to play in your browser. The draw for a lot of gamers is the pedigree: it's co-designed by Jeremy Ducret and Johannes Goupy, and Goupy was one half of the team behind the 2023 hit Faraway.
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Start organising for freeIn Collect! you draw a card and slot it into your row, racing to line up four identical animals into a set the game calls an Alliance so you can claim the Crown before anyone else does. The catch is that every animal has its own agenda. A chameleon that copies the animals beside it and a monkey that swaps cards around keep the table in constant flux, so the player who looks like a runaway leader can get dragged back in a single turn. It's a small, mean little card game, the sort that suits a warm-up or a wind-down rather than the main event.
Goupy's track record is the reason to give it a look. Faraway, his card game with Corentin Lebrat, won a lot of fans for its brain-bending trick of scoring your cards in reverse order, and it reviewed well right across the hobby. Collect! is a simpler beast, but the same instinct for a tiny idea with a sting is there. Now that it's on Board Game Arena, it sits alongside the platform's growing pile of free-to-learn titles, which makes it an easy one to try a few times before deciding whether a physical copy earns a slot on your shelf. If little fillers like this are the glue of your game nights, you can round up a local group to share them with.
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See how it worksSources: Board Game Arena | CMON | Meeple Mountain
