Hermit 2023

Sun, sea and sand in a puzzly duel and super solo game!

A sweet little hermit crab called Hermie needs your help to make it to the ocean on time. Recreate shell patterns with your beach cards and move Hermie closer to his destination step by step. But watch out! The wave card will end up moving further away on every turn if you don’t meet all the requirements with the symbols on your cards.

HOW TO PLAY A shore is created, consisting of ten cards, each showing three symbols. The hermit crab is placed next to the shore, and a wave is placed on the eighth card (or sixth, depending on difficulty).

The player now has a deck of six cards, from which draw cards showing different symbols. Each turn, they play one of those cards, next to or overlapping the cards they have already played. If the player manages to re-create the pattern of the next shore card, the hermit crab moves forward. Any shore card that is passed in this way is added to the deck.

The pattern that is created can also cause the wave to move, making the journey shorter or longer. It also affects the player's hand size (which can be one or two).

The player wins if the crab moves onto the wave. If they run out of cards to play, or if the waves moves past the last card of the shore, the player loses.

GAME MODES Hermit startet out as a true solo game. During development of the German edition and later the Dutch edition, new game modes have been added. The latest German and Dutch versions contain a duel mode, a two player coop mode and multiplayer coop-rules (the latter requires 1 copy per person) in addition to the original solo mode.

— publisher blurb + user summary