Collapsi

Collapsi is a neat little quick card game from 2025 created and presented by Mark Ball on the Riffle, Shuffle and Roll channel.

It only takes a few minutes to figure out, as there are only a few rules.  It's played on a 4x4 grid of regular playing cards (four aces, four 2s, four 3s, two 4s and two jacks).  You move pieces on top of the cards, with each of the players starting on one of the jacks.  On each turn, you move a number of moves equal to the value of the card you start on, with those starting jacks counting as one.  You can wrap around the rows or columns.

After you move, you flip ("collapse") the card you started on.  You cannot move through a collapsed card or land on it.  The only other rules are: you can move through a card with an opponent piece on it but cannot land on an occupied card; you can change direction during your move; but you can't land on any card more than once during your move.  The last player who makes a valid move is the winner.

The actual feel of the game is very basic.  It becomes obvious that you don't want to get stuck on higher cards later in the game, but when we started off trying to move as little as possible, we ended up with the aces flipped and only higher cards left to land on.  I'm sure that after playing enough times you will be able to visualize a few moves ahead, but in two of our three games, I ended up blocking off Anne without even planning it ...  oh look, I can't move.  Huh.

It's fun to see a gamer like Mark with so many ideas and variations in his head, and places to follow the development of the game.  The home page of Collapsi is here.  He talks about scoring systems and statistics here.

The simplest scoring for the two player game is to play a series of games and the winner of each game scores one point for each card left face up.  The simulation on that same page shows that on average between 5 and 6 cards are left uncollapsed at the end of a game.

Apparently, Mark and his team has some unexpected issues trying to create rules for a solo version, but they might release a set of solvable card layouts as solo puzzles.

One of his latest videos gives a variation called Collapsi Shift where at the end of each move you can shift the row or column containing the space you landed on by one space in either direction.

It seems like this would get confusing, take up a lot more space, and lead to a lot or orphaned, disconnected groups of cards, but we have not tried it out yet.  I think I saw another video where he released a custom set of cards for Collapsi.

One thing we noticed is that playing cards on our slippery craft table was messy.  The cards kept sliding  or spinning around.  So, this would be better on a tablecloth.  Somehow, in Mark's videos the cards behave.  Maybe a fresh deck is the real trick.  Most of ours have been riffled so many times, none of them want to sit still.

Also, the game isn't going to last more than five or six moves per player.  Available spaces disappear quickly.  It's a good example of a game that is so simple you just want to think of ways to extend it.  Here is how that game ended for us ...

 I was the number-5 die.  I moved up two and flipped my card, and Anne (the poker die) could not even begin a move.