Bin Raiders 2026

Somewhere between the last streetlight and the first garbage truck of the morning, the raccoons are already at work. Lids come off, bins go over, and by sunrise every yard on the street looks like a crime scene. Your job is simple: end the night with the tidiest yard on the block. The trouble is that you can't quite remember what's in your own bins — and neither can anyone else.

Bin Raiders is a game of memory, bluff and small betrayals. Four bins, face down, and only a vague recollection of what you buried in them a few turns ago. Peek, swap, dump your worst card in a neighbor's yard, and call it a night before someone beats you to it.

Bin Raiders grew out of a game my daughter brought home from her studies in Canada, played over there with a standard deck of cards and known as "Le Jeu de la Marmotte". She played it constantly. And since she has always been affectionately known in the family as the Raccoon, giving the game a raccoon-and-garbage-bin theme felt less like a design decision than an inevitability. What started as a private joke turned into a proper redesign. "Le Jeu de la Marmotte" is one of those games whose rules shift from table to table — everyone plays a slightly different version, and half of every first game is spent arguing about what the Jack does. Bin Raiders settles those arguments: the rules here are fixed, explicit, and the same at every table.

The deck was rebuilt around that goal. Instead of asking players to remember that a Jack peeks and a Queen swaps, each card carries an animal that is its effect — raccoons rummage, badgers and beavers swap, the bear does as it pleases. Values run from −2 to 13 rather than through a suit system that carries no meaning in this game. The result plays faster, explains itself in a couple of minutes, and works with younger players who would otherwise spend the whole game reciting a table of card effects instead of watching their opponents. Five rounds, five chances to blow it — lowest total at the end wins.

—description from the designer