Designed by Frank Noack and Rico Besteher, and published by Arcane Wonders and FunBot, GAP is a light easy-to-play set collection card game that uses a deck of shiny foil cards numbered 1-9 in five different colours/suits.
Players are dealt a hand of cards and, on your turn, you play one of the cards from your hand to your individual tableau. There's a display of four cards, replenished after each turn, and if the number of the card you play matches any in the display you add those cards too to your tableau. If your card doesn't match any number in the display but there are cards in the display that have numbers adjacent to your card number, you collect one of the higher and one lower number. If the card you play has no matches and or adjacent numbers in the display, you don't collect any extra cards - only the card you play gets added to your tableau.
The rules then are easy to learn. The name of the game is GAP because at the end of the round (when players have played all the cards in their hand) your tableau scores for the gap between the suit/colour with the most cards and the suit/colour with the least. So, for example, if you end up with 5 blue, 4 green, 2 yellow, 2 pink and 1 purple card, you'll score four points: the gap between your blue and purple suits, ignoring all the others. The twist is that tied suits are added together, so if our example instead had 5 blue, 5 green, 2 yellow, 1 pink and 1 purple, you'd score eight points (5 + 5) - (1 +1).
There's obviously a high luck factor over what cards appear when in the four-card display and GAP can be enjoyed by casual players just taking the cards as they come but there's scope for tactics because you know for certain at the start of each round that all the cards in your hand will end up in your tableau. If you start off with a hand with an obviously dominant suit then it will make sense to try to play other cards when they'll let you collect more cards in that suit. Canny players will also want to profit from the twist in the scoring that rewards ties.
It's not in the official rules but if you want to experiment with alternative house rules, we'd recommend trying the variant we've been playing at Board's Eye View. In our variant, players score the gap between the highest and the second highest suit instead of the lowest suit; this makes going for tied suits a much higher risk push-your-luck gamble...
GAP takes 2-6 players. You should agree upfront how many points you're playing to but a 15-point target will probably involve playing for three rounds. Most of our plays at Board's Eye View have run to around 15-20 minutes, making this very suitable card game for filling a games night GAP.