Setup
All sixteen pieces, one of each animal in two colors, are shuffled and placed face-down on the sixteen squares. Nobody knows which animal or which color sits under a tile until it is flipped. The first tile you flip sets your color for the rest of the game.
A turn
On your turn you either flip one face-down tile to reveal it, or move one of your own revealed animals one square up, down, left, or right. Early on, before pieces come up, flipping is all you can do.
Capturing
Capture an adjacent enemy you outrank, with the same rat-beats-elephant exception as the full game. Equal ranks work differently here. When an animal meets an enemy of its own rank, both leave the board (同归于尽, “they perish together”), and neither side keeps the square. Because identities stay hidden until contact, every attack is a bet, and the mutual-destruction rule raises the price of guessing wrong.
Winning
You win when your opponent has nothing left to do: no piece to move and no tile to flip. In practice that means capturing or trading away everything they have.
Draws
Games draw on threefold repetition, or when 40 half-moves (20 by each player) pass with no flip, capture, or trade.
A full game
Step through a game our bot played against itself. The two lions meet and both leave the board, an elephant runs through three pieces until it hits the other elephant and they cancel too, and the side left standing wins. Tiles flip to their dealt animal the first time they are turned over.
Where to next
Flip Jungle is playable on Mistboard: take on MistyJungleFlip, or challenge a friend. Jungle is the full 7×9 game these animals come from.