Cockroach Poker Royal is a bluffing, push-your-luck card game where you try and avoid ending up with a set of four matching animal cards. You pass cards to other players and tell them what it is, they guess if you are telling the truth and have to keep the card if they get it wrong. This simple premise leads to all sorts of intricate poker-style bluffing and card-tracking tactics and double-crossing.

Play begins with all the cards being dealt to the players. You take turns to pass one card from your hand, face down on the table, to any other player. You make a claim about what the card is, cockroach, a rat, stink bug and so on. The other player guesses if this is true or false. If they are wrong they have to keep it. If they are right the original player gets it. Either way, it ends up facing up in front of someone and takes them one step closer to losing.

As you progress you start to accrue a collection of face-up animal cards by getting these guesses wrong. If you end up with four matching animals you are out and everyone else wins. This leads to all sorts of bluffing and card-tracking tactics because you know which cards other players don't want and how many of each have been revealed.

The game leans into this with a final rule. You can decide not to guess if a player is lying and instead look at the card and pass it on to someone else, making a lie (or truth) of your own. This not only de-risks the choice but adds a layer of tactics around who ends up as the final player to be presented the card and can't pass it on and must challenge or accept the potential lie.

The Royal version of the game also provides extra cards to add more complexity, although you don't have to use them. There's a new Royals set of cards that makes you also take a card from a penalty deck. There are also some Joker cards that always represent a lie and a Multi Animal card that's never a lie.

The result, particularly with the basic set of cards, is a super simple bluffing game that has really deep tactics and strategy development. The fun rests as much on the deviousness of the players (and how well they know each other) rather than on complicated rules.