About The Lady and the Tiger
The Lady and the Tiger is a microgame collection from Jellybean Games, with art by Tania Walker, named after Frank R. Stockton’s short story about a prisoner who must open one of two doors. Every card is a Lady or a Tiger and red or blue: four Door cards, twelve Clue cards and two wild cards, plus 25 gems. With those eighteen cards you can play five games by five design teams: Doors, a 2-player bluffing game by Peter C. Hayward; Favor, a 2–4 player bidding game by Allysha Tulk and Kevin Carmichael; Hoard, a solo puzzle by Ken Maher; Labyrinth, a 2-player maze game by Philip Tootill; and Traps, a 2–6 player bluffing game by JR Honeycutt.
Each game runs 10 to 20 minutes. The product page says ages 10+, the rulebook 8+. It is a good set for two people and a coffee table, and the solo and six-player games stretch it either way. Jellybean Games offers each game as its own small PDF, Italian translations, and a Google Drive folder with the full-art deck and the complete rulebook, all free for personal use; the download button goes to the publisher’s page.
How to play in one minute
Doors, the two-player game, shows the pattern:
- Shuffle the four Door cards and deal one face down to each player: that is your secret identity (for example, Red Lady). Shuffle the fourteen Clue cards, reveal four as a display and give each player a reference card.
- One player is the Collector, the other the Guesser. The Collector takes a card from the display each turn and may score a set of four cards sharing one trait with their identity for 6 gems.
- The Guesser discards a card from the display each turn and may guess the Collector’s colour or role (1 gem), both (5 gems), or score a set from the Collector’s cards (2 gems). A wrong guess gives the Collector 4 gems.
- A contest ends as soon as someone earns gems; swap roles, redeal and play again.
- The first player to 10 gems wins. Favor turns the deck into three days of auctions, Hoard into a solo puzzle, Labyrinth into a maze and Traps into a bluffing game for up to six.
What’s in the PDF
- Five small PDFs (Doors, Favor, Hoard, Labyrinth, Traps), 2–3 Letter pages each, in colour, with the rules and the cards for that game, plus Italian rules for each.
- In the Drive folder: the full-art deck (17 Letter sheets, 120 MB), the 40-page rulebook, a token sheet and assembly notes about the four Door card backs.
- Print on card stock and cut; 25 gems or any small tokens in five colours cover every game.
In the PDF
- Five print-and-play sets, one per game (Doors, Favor, Hoard, Labyrinth, Traps), each with its rules and cards (2–3 Letter pages)
- Italian rules for all five games (A4)
- Google Drive folder with the full-art deck (17 pages), the 40-page rulebook, a token sheet and assembly notes