by W. Eric Martin

Game publisher CMON has many outstanding crowdfunding campaigns to be fulfilled, and in April 2025 it let go of staff employees and paused "all future game development and new crowdfunding campaigns".

That said, while announcing an update on three crowdfunding campaigns in July 2025, CMON wrote, "leading up to SPIEL Essen, we'll have some exciting information to share about several small-box games that have been in development for some time. Many will make their debut in Essen, and will reach retail soon after, so stay tuned."

CMON has kept mum about game announcements beyond that note, but at Gen Con 2025 CMON global marketing director David Waybright slipped me a copy of Jérémy Ducret and Johannes Goupy's Collect!, one of the aforementioned small-box games, and the box is small indeed! If not for the French art, you might mistake this for an Oink Games release. You could fit more than forty copies of Collect! inside a copy of Cthulhu: Death May Die should you be inspired to do something pointless like that.

Gamers have been pointing to new small-box games as a response to U.S. tariffs, but the small-box trend has been escalating for years, seemingly due to the market's desire for lower price points. Obviously exceptions exist, but in general publishers are going smaller.

And with smallness comes simplicity, at least in terms of the components. Within Collect!'s small box is nothing more than a deck of cards, three half-crown tokens, and a full-crown token.

The game lasts four rounds, with the winner of the first three rounds receiving a half-crown token; if someone collects two, they win. Otherwise, whoever wins the fourth round claims the full-crown token and outright victory, regardless of how they performed previously. Thus, in a game with four or five players, everyone has a shot in that final round — which might suggest that the first three rounds are moot, but I'd instead view this evenhandedness as being in the spirit of the design. After all, luck is likely to play a role in who wins each round, so why not do the same for the game as a whole?

Let's see this luck in practice: To set up, shuffle the cards, then split them into two face-down piles. On a turn, reveal the top card of one deck to all players, then either (a) take this card and add it to your row or (b) return it face down to the top of either pile, then add the top card of the other pile to your row. When you add a card, you can't place it where you want, but must add it on the left or right end of your row, which is usually a bummer since to win a round, you need to have four cards of the same type grouped together in a row. (A better title for this game might be "Collect Four", but Hasbro lawyers would have none of that, I'm sure.)


Each card shows one of eight animals, and when you add the chosen card to your row, you can carry out that animal's power, some of which can be used both offensively and defensively. The alligator, for example, returns any other card in play to the bottom of a pile. Is an opponent about to win? Eat one of their critters! An animal broke a potential chain of your own? Cannibalize it to link that chain!

Similarly, the crab allows you to move any card in play left or right in a row any number of spaces, and the monkey swaps itself with any other card in play.


The parrot stands apart from other cards in its "Hail Mary" nature. When you add it to your row, name an animal, then reveal the top card of one pile; if you flip the named animal, add it to your row, then use its power, if desired. Hey, don't players have the option of revealing a card, then putting it back? Maybe you even revealed the top card of the other pile yourself before blindly drawing a parrot. Whatever the case, the parrot is ready to call that animal to your side.

The hermit crab does diddly unless you already have a crab, in which case you take another turn immediately...which doesn't seem like much until you discover the lion and octopus, each of which carries a victory condition of its own:

▪️ If you have a lion in your row and seven types of animals (with the lion being one of those, of course), you win the round.

▪️ If you have an octopus in your row and three pairs of cards (with the paired cards needing to be next to one another, but not the pairs themselves), you win the round.


A hermit crab can get you two cards at once, rushing you to either alternate victory condition — or even the standard one should you draw into a colony of hermit crabs.

The glue for all of these animals is the chameleon, which has no power when added to your row, but which can be the animal of your choice once in your row — or when you reveal it. Whatever you name with the parrot, the chameleon will satisfy that wish. With a lion, the chameleon counts as a unique animal type, and with an octopus, you can pair it with the animal on either side.

The drawback, however, is that should you place a second chameleon in your row, both of them go away. Apparently a chameleon can be anything it wants when it looks in the mirror — other than itself.

As you might have gathered (collected?), you could luck into a win quickly. Draw an alligator each turn, and you're done! More often, though, you're trying to increase your chances for victory while simultaneously defending against someone else winning, although that's not always your concern. In my lone five-player game, people often played for themselves, trying to stop someone only if that player were next in turn order. I mean, there's a good chance they won't draw what they need, so why not play for myself?

In a three-player game, we kept an eye on one another more readily — and after an opponent won the first round, I directed all of my attacks against them because if they won a second time, that was game; if my other opponent won, well, I'd still have a shot.

As simple as Collect! is, I've noticed players making less than ideal moves, at least by my judgy standards. They overlook a crab's ability to break up an opponent's trio or thwart an octopus on the verge of victory; they do a mediocre monkey swap when they had an opportunity to both hinder an opponent and advance their chances; they decline a lion when it would have been their fifth or sixth animal; they reveal a card even though they definitely want the card previously revealed on the other pile, thereby giving information to others.

Combined with this, some players have had problems remembering what the animal cards do, despite their decent iconography, which has made gameplay much slower than the 15 minutes listed on the box. Has my teaching been inadequate? After a one-minute overview of gameplay and goals — build a row of animals in front of you and get four in a row to win — I explain each card as it's revealed. Collect! has no hidden information, so it feels unnecessary to explain all eight cards before you see them. Dive in, and see what happens! (Not everyone likes learning games this way, but this game feels like one better experienced than learned, if you get what I mean.)

The player who caught on quickest was a 12-year-old who won two-out-of-three rounds in about ten minutes, with a rematch not taking place only because I had to head somewhere else.

Heading toward an octopus-fueled victory
I think this mixture of poor and slow play emerges thanks to Collect! being a strongly tactical game that's also driven by luck, while being wrapped in cute art and graphic design. Some view this fluffy-looking game as being purely luck-driven, so they play a card without realizing that they could make a better choice.

Others recognize the power of cards, but overthink what to do, freezing when deciding whether to take the card in hand rather than the mystery card or when spending a (relatively) long time pondering where to swap a monkey, especially when this monkey is the third one in their row. You can hear the gears turning: "I don't want to swap this as I need only one more to win. What can I get that will help?" They're looking and looking, and I remind them the monkey can be swapped for any card in play, and they're still looking, and I might then add, "Such as a different monkey card", and then the light finally goes on. (Or don't swap it at all, of course, but you almost always want to use a power.)

I realize that I'm talking more about player activity related to the game rather than the game itself, but this activity is what reveals the nature of the game. I mean, a game is nothing without player activity, right?

Innovation, the #1 game of all time, is another high-luck, high-tactics design, with some describing it (dismissing it?) as "gamer's Fluxx" and others freezing because they're sure a "correct" move exists and want to weigh every option first...even though the "correct" move is often revealed only turns later because you couldn't account for which cards are where in the decks.

Collect! is nowhere near as rich and varied as Innovation, but I think the design will work best for those who thrive on high-luck, high-tactics designs, for those who just do stuff to see what happens. Innovation is a deep box of tools, and the more you play, the more you can find new ways to use each tool. By comparison, Collect! has a starter tool set combined with a couple of blueprints that give you something else to build. The cleverness possible with five blunt tools is limited, but it still feels nice when you get two actions from one card, building momentum toward victory that forces others to search for solutions.

CMON plans to debut Collect! at SPIEL Essen 25, with the game then appearing in various parts of the world after that, with a North American release being likely in Q1 2026.