How to play
Five rubber ducks (red, blue, green, yellow and purple) race down a stream of 16 spaces. Nobody owns a duck: everyone bets, and the player with the most coins at the end wins. Everyone starts with 3 coins.
The race runs in legs. Each leg, every duck gets one die (1 to 3), and the dice come out of the cup in a random order. On your turn, do one thing:
- Roll a die. A random duck moves 1 to 3 spaces, and you earn 1 coin.
- Take a leg slip. Each duck has slips worth 5, 3 and 2; you take the top one. At the end of the leg a slip pays its value if that duck is in front, 1 if it’s second, and costs 1 otherwise.
- Lay your stream tile on an empty space, not next to another tile: 💨 fast water moves a duck that lands there one space on, 🌾 reeds one space back. You earn 1 coin each time a duck lands on it. Tiles go back at the end of the leg.
- Bet on the race. Guess the duck that will win, or the one that will come last. Each player has one card per duck, for either pile, and nobody sees which duck you picked until the end.
Stacks
A duck that lands where other ducks are climbs on top. When a duck moves, every duck on top of it rides along. A duck on top of a stack is ahead of the ones under it, so a duck in last place can leap to the front by landing on a stack. A duck sent back by reeds slides underneath.
The end
When a duck crosses the finish after space 16, the leg is scored, then the race bets: the first right guess on the winner pays 8, the next 5, then 3, 2, 1 and 1 after that; every wrong guess costs 1. The loser pile pays the same way. Coins never go below zero. A tie for the most coins is a shared win.
Tips
Rolling earns a coin but shows everyone where the ducks are heading, which helps the next player more than you. Grab the 5 slip early, when the duck on top of a stack near the front looks good. Race bets pay most to whoever is right first, so a brave early guess can be worth the risk.