Manticore 2026

Manticore is a 3-player climbing-shedding game where every hand, each player is restricted to playing only one type of meld: Sets, Runs, or Flushes. To facilitate this, it uses a unique deck of 47 cards with 10 ranks, 10 suits, and 3 colours.

Each hand, players will receive a hand of 15 cards and will bid for the right to be declarer, who plays alone against the other two players. The declarer receives an extra 2 cards into their hand, and gets their pick of the three types of melds. The other two players will choose their melds in turn.

The play of the game is similar to other climbing-shedding games, except players -- instead of matching meld type and length -- always play their own particular meld type and match length, while playing a higher value rank than the previous meld that they are beating.

The first player to shed out wins points for themself (declarer) or their team (defenders), and then a new hand is played where players will again be choosing a meld type based on their cards.

—description from the designer