First things first. You win Finguz by being the first to reach The Ring — a.k.a. the winner's circle. Just that simple, except for everyone who's trying to beat you to it.
Instead of using dice to move, Finguz uses Flickoffs. It’s like Rock Paper Scissors, but with the number of fingers instead.
Players move from space to space. You flick off against the player whose color space you're already on. If it's your color, you get to pick your opponent.
Whenever you land on your own color space, you get to draw a card. That's a good thing. You should learn about the Finguz cards.
Offense can go past spaces with other players on them already. There is no blocking in Finguz, but there’s something even better: poking!
When you land on a space with a player on it, you “poke” them. You stay where they were and they go back two spaces. Haha.
To start, each player picks a color. No fistfights, please. Finguz is a competitive yet semi-civil game.
Now comes the fun part. To decide who goes first, everyone does a Flickoff at the same time. Let's call this a Ginormous Flickoff.
Who wins? The player with the highest unique number. (See how the word "unique" is bold?)
This is sort of the same but different from the Flickoff matches you'll have during the rest of the game.
Okay, whoever won first to start places their token on the number 1 space. Turns go clockwise around the board, so place the rest of the tokens in that order on the numbered spaces.
Random is as random does. If you just can’t take the fact that Finguz packs strategy into what would otherwise be a random roll of dice, that’s okay. You can use a single die from any other game and re-roll a six during Flickoffs.
By the way, this is how you play a one-person game, too. You pick your number and roll a die for your "opponent."
Yup. There are cards.
Cards add even more strategy to a Finguz game.
So your fourth player went AWOL. No worries. For the color spaces without a player, just treat those like your own color spaces—you get to pick your Flickoff opponent. Other than that, it's all the same. You still only draw a card when you land on your own color space.
Hey, where is everyone? Same as the 3-Player version. Of course, you'll be flicking off against each other all day or night, depending on what time it is and time zones and stuff.