Always Packed Why PUSH Lives in My Bag

I am the person who always has a board game with me. Going to a brewery? Game in the bag. Waiting for food? Game in the bag. Family gathering where someone inevitably says "we should play something"? (Even if that person is me) Game in the bag

For a game to earn permanent residency in my purse, backpack, or meeple bag, it needs to be easy to teach, quick to play, and small enough that I don't think twice about bringing it along

PUSH checks every box

The box itself is a little bigger than I'd like, so my copy lives in a Ziploc bag. The game inside is just a deck of cards and an evil, evil die

🎰 PUSH

🏛️ Designed by Prospero Hall and Brian Kirk | 👥 2 to 6 players | ⏳ ~20 minutes

⚙️ Set collection and push your luck

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

PUSH keeps things simple. The deck is 120 cards. They come in five colors and are numbered from 1 to 6, along with two special card types that create all the drama:

• Roll cards force whoever collects them to roll the die. Roll a color that you've left sitting unprotected in front of you and those points disappear

• Switch cards reverse the order that players collect stacks at the end of a turn. It sounds harmless until the pile you were counting on either has a roll card or suddenly ends up in someone else's collection

That's it! No text to memorize. No exceptions. Just enough variety to keep everyone nervous

THE VIBE

PUSH is a push your luck game where every decision feels obvious right up until it isn't. On your turn, you reveal cards one at a time and place them into up to three stacks. The catch is that cards in the same stack cannot share a color or a number. As long as you can legally place the card somewhere, you can keep going. The question is whether you should 🙈

You can stop at any time and claim one stack for yourself, but the remaining stacks get collected by the other players. Push too far and reveal a card that can't legally go anywhere? Your turn immediately ends, you get nothing, and everyone else gets to collect. I have watched people stare at three perfectly good stacks, say "one more card," and immediately regret their life choices. Including myself, repeatedly all the time

PUSH stands out in the sense that you're never just playing for yourself. Every card you place affects the choices available to everyone else. Sometimes the decision isn't which stack you want. It's which stack you least want your friends to get

THE EVIL, EVIL DIE

Most push your luck games make you fear the deck. PUSH makes you fear the die. Throughout the game, you'll collect cards into your bench. When the deck runs out, you'll score all the cards in your bench plus any cards you've banked. Highest total wins.

The trick is keeping those points long enough to score them

Instead of playing cards on your turn, you can spend your turn banking all cards of one color. Those cards are flipped face down and protected for the rest of the game. Any colors you haven't banked are still vulnerable. If you push too far and bust, or if you collect a Roll card, you'll roll the die. If it lands on a color showing in your bench, every card of that color gets discarded. Roll the black side which contains a star, and you get lucky. Nothing happens

I've lost enough points to this die that I no longer trust it. The worst part is that banking always feels like something you can do next turn. Then you collect a Roll card, roll the exact color you were planning to bank, and suddenly half your points are gone while everyone else at the table finds the situation much funnier than you do

PLAYER COUNTS

PUSH works well at every player count. At two players, it becomes surprisingly strategic. The Switch cards can be removed entirely since they don't do anything (or you can add a house rule like we did: Switch cards mean you roll the die and both get to bank those cards. If we are feeling mean, you roll the die for the other person to discard whatever colors shows up on the dice), and the game turns into a tighter duel where you're constantly trying to leave your opponent bad options

With four to six players, the game gets louder and more chaotic. Everyone suddenly becomes an expert on when you should stop pushing your luck, and every die roll gets an audience. The energy shifts completely because you aren't just watching your own choices, you're actively sitting there praying your friends greedily flip one more card and bust, leaving the safe stacks completely untouched for the rest of us. If I had to choose, I'd rather play with four or more, yet it plays well at two

PROS

🍀 Simple, fast, and slightly mean

👩🏻‍🏫 Easy to teach

▶️ Very replayable

👁️ Colorblind friendly

🎒 Small box footprint

🌍 Language independent

🥳 Plays well at every count

CONSIDERATIONS

📦 The box is slightly larger than it needs to be

🎲 The die can erase a lot of hard-earned points

🍀 If you like strategy games, this one may feel very luck based

BOTTOM LINE

PUSH is fast, portable, easy to teach, and anyone can play it. That's a combination that's surprisingly hard to find. If you're looking for a game to keep in your bag for breweries, family gatherings, vacations, or those moments when you unexpectedly have twenty minutes to kill, PUSH is one you should check out

MORE GAMES LIKE PUSH

📊 Tally Up for another portable setup where everyone stays completely involved in your decisions, trading the card stacks for real-time calculation drama

💚 Flip 7 for the same shared experience with lighter chaos and that exact same just one more card energy with low rules overhead

💀 Skull for another default travel companion that drops the deck mechanics completely for pure, nerve-wracking bluffing and tension

🟦 Cockroach Poker for the same pocket-sized portable footprint but trading the dice-chucking math for pure table lies and psychological misery