How To Play: Cobra
Learn Cobra’s secret colours, wooden snake building, head-move challenges and the end-of-round scoring basics.
Cobra, by Christoph Cantzler and Torsten Marold, combines wooden snake building with secret colours and bluffing. Your aim is to score well for your colour without knocking a snake over or making your interest too obvious.
Setup
The game uses three differently marked baskets and snakes built from alternating neutral and coloured wooden segments. Each player receives a secret colour at random from the five colours.
Building a snake
On your turn, take a neutral segment and a coloured segment of your choice and add them to the snakes. The catalogue summary describes putting the pair on one snake. For placement options and the treatment of the snake head, use the instructions in your copy.
The head and secret colours
Before your regular move, you can try to place or move the head onto a snake. Its location affects how the baskets score. Other players get a chance to guess your colour first. A correct guess makes you reveal it and prevents that head move; a wrong guess lets the move go ahead.
Ending and scoring
The game ends when everyone passes or a snake falls. The player who caused the fall scores zero. Otherwise, your coloured segments and the basket/head scoring determine your result; use the printed scoring values to calculate it. Highest score wins, and several rounds can be added together.
First-game tips
Separate the two things a placement does: it changes the physical balance and adds colour to a scoring snake. Before attempting a head move, consider what your earlier placements have revealed about your colour.
Rules and further reading
Read our Cobra review for a closer look at the game.