Cocktail Poison is a game from Japan with players trying to poison other players' drinks for fun and profit.

The game has a set of cards for 6 different shaped glasses for drinking (flutes, bowls, martini and so on), and tiles in 4 colour poisons (Red, Yellow, Blue, Green) and a white antidote tile. Each player is dealt one secret empty cocktail glass (the martini glass must be one as that decides the next start player), and gets a set of the five tiles. The start player is the last person to break a glass.

Each player chooses one of their five tiles in secret and places it face-down with their empty glass card face-down on top. This makes a combination of glass style and colour which is secretly poisoned.

The rest of the glasses cards show each style of glass with each colour of drink, making up 24 cards. The four colour cards for each style of empty glass being used are selected and shuffled to make a face-down deck. Three cards are dealt up (four with 5 or 6 players).

Players then take turns drawing a face-up card, and placing it up in front of themselves until each player has drawn four cards. Then the secret combos of glass and poison are revealed and players work out their scores for the round.

If a player has a combo of poison and glass style that another player has drawn, they gain +2 pts, and the poisoned player loses -1 pt. If a player has drawn no poisoned cards, they gain +1 pt.

The white antidote tile is used during the card draw turns. If a player has chosen to hide their antidote tile, they can play it onto one of glass cards at the time they select it. This neutralises the poison, meaning if another player then had that combo, they do not score 2 pts because the poison failed. And the victim gains +1 pt for successfully using the antidote, but did not have a poison combo in play.

Players cannot score less than zero on a round, and the game continues until a player scores at least 5 points. The player with the most points is the winner.

The second edition corrects the rule that whilst a player may rarely draw more than one poisoned glass, if they successfully apply an antidote to one, they still gain +1 pt for that and do not take -1 pt for the further poisons they did not cancel.
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Games