Bugs Under Rugs 2026

Someone has been sweeping things under the rug, and now the bugs want in. In Bugs Under Rugs, two rival colonies of beetles, one red and one green, start along the baseboards of a hexagonal room. In the middle of the floor lie seven black rugs, and each colony wants as many of its bugs as possible hidden under them before the scurrying stops.

On your turn you move one whole stack of bugs that you control, in a straight line, jumping over anything in its way. The distance isn't up to you: a stack must move exactly as many cells as you have swarms. A swarm is a group of your exposed bugs that touch each other. Spread out and your bugs race across the room; bunch up and they creep one cell at a time. Hiding a bug, splitting a group or joining two groups changes your swarm count, so every move also changes how far your next move must go. Bugs may only move inward or around the room, never back toward the walls. Land on an enemy stack and you climb on top and take control of it. Land on a rug and you crawl underneath.

A rug isn't a safe vault. An opponent can climb onto your hidden stack, even under the rug, and take the whole pile. Whoever is on top of a mixed stack can also drag it back out into the open toward the center. If you hide all of your exposed bugs, you have no swarms left and cannot move at all.

When neither player can move, the rugs are lifted. Each rug's whole stack, whatever colors are buried in it, scores one point per bug for the player whose bug is on top. The player with the most points wins. If the score is tied, the player controlling more rugs wins, and if that is also tied, the player who made the last move wins.

—description from the publisher