Designed by Jef Drawbaugh and published by Bezu Games, Rogues Gallery is a small-box card game where the 2-4 players are creating individual 4 x 4 card grids that match 'Rogues' with 'Jobs'. You score the points value of completed Jobs, so the object is to have the highest score when the game ends either when a player fills their grid with completed Jobs or the recycled draw deck is exhausted.
Players all start off with a 'Leader' card which they place in front of them to form the top left position of their grid. You have a hand of three cards and you draw another card at the start of your turn. There are some 'Action' cards which you play to the discard pile in order to take the indicated action but most cards show either 'Rogues' or 'Jobs'. Cards can only be placed in your grid orthogonally adjacent to a card already in place, and Rogues can only be placed in the leftmost column or topmost row. The Rogue cards portray a usually seedy-looking character along with a colour/icon indicating their skill set and a numerical value. Jobs show the specific skills and numerical total needed to complete them; so, for example, to complete a job with the red dagger and yellow moneybag icon and value 8, you'd need the Job card to line up by row and column with a yellow and a red Rogue whose total comes to at least 8. There are Equipment cards that can be placed out to boost your totals and there are Hidecout cards that help protect cards in your grid from being poached by other players' Action cards.
Rogues Gallery then is a hand management tableau building game. The adjacency requirement for card placement obviously limits your initial options but once your tableau is underway there are optimisation decisions to be taken over what goes where. There will also be a degree of push-your-luck too over your card positioning. The Action cards add a potential 'take that' element to the game that makes it interactive, tho' if your plays are anything like ours at Board's Eye View, you'll probably find players' attention is firmly focused on their own grids, to the extent that we were surprised that Bezu Games hadn't incorporated a solo option in the rules. It wouldn't take a huge amount of ingenuity to devise solitaire rules of your own. This game's compact size makes it an ideal travel companion for the holiday season, and at a push you might just be able to fit your 4 x 4 grid onto an airline tray table...