This is a tactical trick-taking game for 2-5 players. It's designed by Brad Ross and published by Cheatwell/Outset. The cards all carry cute wild animal illustrations, which mainly accounts for the game's title, but there is also a card in each set that's labelled as a 'wild card', tho' it's actually simply a card that outranks any of the numbered cards so it might just as well have been given the number 6 (the numbered cards run from 1 through to 5).
Players each have their own identical hand of 11 cards in their own colour: two each of cards numbered 1-5 and one 'wild' (ie: value 6). In each of 11 rounds, players play a card from their hand (played face down so simultaneously revealed). The highest unique value wins the trick; so, for example, in a three-player game, if two players both play a card value 5, they effectively cancel each other out so that the remaining player would win the trick with a 1.
Tho' notionally playable with two, with tied tricks simply added to the trick for the next round, the Wild Card Game is at its best at higher player counts. It's a game that favours card counters who keep track of which cards each player has played and so knows which cards are still available to the other players, and there's a strong push-your-luck element as you try to anticipate other players' duplication so that you win tricks with low-value cards. Nevertheless, this is a light family game.
Players score a point for each trick won, and the winner is the player with the highest total after four rounds. Each round takes roughly 5 minutes, so you can expect the game to take around 20 minutes. The simultaneous play means player count doesn't materially affect the playing time. We're not sure we'd fully endorse the slogan on the box claiming the game is 'totally roarsome!' but it makes for a fun filler that children, in particular, will enjoy, particularly as they learn to second-guess and anticipate each other's card plays.