Cocktail Games

Cocktail Games is a French tabletop-game publisher founded in 2003 by Hjalmar Hach and Matthieu d'Epenoux. Its catalogue is associated especially with compact, accessible games rather than long campaign boxes. The company is closely linked with Jungle Speed, a reflex game designed by Hach. In a standard round, players reveal cards and race to seize a central wooden totem when matching symbols appear. That deliberately physical contest became one of the publisher's defining titles and has appeared in several editions and themed variants, including versions that retain the totem as the game's instantly recognizable centrepiece for players worldwide today. Another cornerstone is Hanabi, designed by Antoine Bauza and originally published by Cocktail Games in 2010. Hanabi asks participants to build shared fireworks displays while holding their own cards facing outward, so each player can see everyone else's hand but not their own. Information is limited, and clues must be used carefully to identify colors and numbers before mistakes exhaust the group. The game's international recognition was cemented when it received the 2013 Spiel des Jahres, the German jury's annual main award. Its victory made a small-box cooperative card game central to Cocktail's public profile beyond France and other markets. Cocktail Games also brought Peter Sarrett's Time's Up! to French players. The party game divides play into three successive rounds using the same set of names: first players may speak freely, then they are limited to one word, and finally they mime. This repeated-deck structure makes memory from earlier rounds part of the contest. The publisher has worked with both established designers and newer authors, building a line that spans speed games, deduction games, cooperative card games, and social word games. Its small formats, often sold in distinctive metal tins, are a recurring feature of its French releases and abroad. More recently, Cocktail Games published Trio, a card game by Japanese designer Kaya Miyano. Players try to make sets of three matching cards by using information available from the lowest and highest cards in opponents' hands, plus cards on the table. Its rules make hand order visible enough to support deduction, while keeping key values hidden. Trio won the 2024 Spiel des Jahres, giving Cocktail Games another winner of Germany's most prominent board-game prize after Hanabi. Across these releases, the publisher's record is defined by games whose rules create immediate table interaction: grabbing a totem, exchanging constrained clues, or reading opponents' cards.