There’s a moment that perfectly crystallizes the spirit of Jenna Felli’s latest game, a title every bit as unhinged and out of step with the broader hobby as the rest of her greatest hits, Dûhr: The Lesser Houses, Cosmic Frog, and The Mirroring of Mary King.

For most of the game’s duration, you’ve been assembling swarms of flies. Mayflies, dragonflies, deer flies — all varieties, illustrated by Rowan Morgan with a crispness that wouldn’t feel out of place in a children’s book of entomology. Then, outta nowheres, BLAM, they are here, drawn in color and motion at odds with the stillness of those flies. And they’re going to wreck somebody’s day.

It’s Murray.

Murray the Frog.

Murray the A**hole Frog.

Not a fly.

Like the rest of Felli’s ludography, Murray the A**hole Frog is a game that occupies its own niche within the hobby ecosystem, one that occasionally gestures at “correct practices” without embracing them — or even, really, seeming aware that they exist. At heart it’s a set collection game, evoking nothing so much as classic rummy. Players draw cards in a variety of ways: you’re passed one by your neighbor to announce it’s your go, draw two more to inaugurate your turn, and sometimes discard to draw replacements or swap one from your hand with one in the pond.

That’s quite a few methods for filling your hand. Like many of this game’s rules, there’s an unexpectedness to what a player can accomplish in a turn. Your objective, at least initially, is to assemble swarms. This is done by arranging sets of matching flies on the table. Even then, there’s some wiggle room. Flies need to match, but unless you’re going for a “perfect” swarm, they don’t need to match match. Mayflies hobnob with house flies or soldier flies with crane flies, certain categories meshing while others cannot. Swarms can also grow in size, earning yet another bonus. Higher values, naturally, are also worth more.

Within a few rounds, the result is a tangle of swarms, each worth some variable amount of points. While a swarm of red cards might appear all-valuable, maybe its mix of deer flies and sand flies prevents it from reaching the same heights as the neighboring swarm of fruit flies, which are numerous and perfectly matching. The rules governing a swarm’s precise scoring may be tangled, but they’re simultaneously clear. Gazing across the tabletop at everybody’s swarms, there’s rarely much doubt about which are worth the most.

Enter Murray. The titular a**hole frog introduces a watershed flashpoint. With all the ceremony of a punch to the abdomen, Murray consumes a swarm outright. Like many of Felli’s games, which are directly confrontational but never cruel, and usually feature methods that award some benefit to victims despite being targeted, these manifestations of hermaphroditic fury cut both ways. First there’s the selection of Murray’s target, nicely scapegoated away from the player who drew the offending card and onto the card itself. It’s Murray who’s the a**hole, not you. You’re merely resolving the responsibility that’s been foisted upon you. If the victim of that responsibility happens to be the leading player — or the player who’s been irritating you the most — it’s only natural.

From there, the contest begins. Wasps can drive Murray to easier targets, but dragonflies might lure them away. For a brief moment, the game resembles something like cascading draws in UNO or redirected attacks in Munchkin. Entire hands are depleted. People lose their heads.

After the feast, after Murray has leaped back into the pond, they deposit something into the afflicted player’s tableau: a tadpole. These are a gift. Worth increasing amounts of points, these swiftly pose a boon to the repeatedly targeted. On more than one occasion, I’ve watched players lure Murray to their own swarms, securing those precious frogspawns for themselves. It’s the a**hole equivalent of shooting the moon.

BLAM!

There’s no denying that this is an oddity. As one friend put it, Murray the A**hole Frog feels like a game fished from the dustbin, something our adolescent selves used to play over and over again — but don’t anymore, for good reason.

I sympathize with that view. This is a cantankerous game. The rules are inelegant. Completing a turn sometimes feels like running down an aviation checklist. Draw two, check. Swap one in hand for one in the pond, check. Make a swarm, check. Discard a royal fly for its ability, check. Counter an opponent’s counter, check. Discard one card for two from the deck, check. Resolve Murray, check. Replenish the pond, check. Make sure you have one card in hand even after passing one to your neighbor, check. Check the checklist one last time. Check.

But while these cards have a tendency to inflict paper cuts, that’s also what makes them interesting. Like many of Felli’s games, Murray the A**hole Frog exchanges smoothness for a particular internality, a series of psychological inquiries that can only be answered in the moment — and which rarely offer clear-cut right or wrong resolutions. I think of the mile-tall amphibians of Cosmic Frog, who must determine a dozen times in one session whether to keep their heads down or slug a foe into the nth dimension and risk reprisal. Or the pattern-making diviners of Mary King, where every action is awkwardly subject to Newton’s Third Law. Or the ambiguous social spaces of Bemused and Dûhr, which raise deeper questions about your gathering of friends than about the specific roles you were assigned during setup. Felli’s catalog is filled with games that have already had their center flung outward by the widening gyre. What little footing they proffer is testy and subject to tremors.

The same is true here. To speak about Murray the A**hole Frog in mechanical terms, we might call it a press-your-luck game. Indeed, one of its most final questions revolves around how long players ought to hold onto their cards. When the game concludes, everything in hand is subtracted from your score, but that’s only one of the ways the issue manifests. Should you hoard those precious wasps and dragonflies or spend them as soon as you’re threatened? Use robberflies and damselflies to pick at opposing swarms, or create your own high-value targets and hope Murray doesn’t wander your way? Maintain a robust hand or keep it trim in case the game-ending hawk appears too soon?

Such a description is wholly accurate, but it also belies the more robust social space the game explores. I’ll put it this way: the operation of Murray the A**hole Frog reflects the personalities of its players. This is a game that can be viciously derailed by an actual asshole, sans the comical asterisks that obscure Murray’s epithet. Or it’s a game that can be lighthearted and silly, packed with calculations, or shrewd and conniving. In most cases, it wheedles into some undefined liminal space, with assholes brushing shoulders with heads-downers while point-counters tally their swarms and schemers figure out novel deployments for their royal flies.

Of course, the same is true of all games. The beauty of the Magic Circle isn’t that it erases the personalities who enter it, but that it shields them and enables play. Playing with a non-asterisk asshole will always be an unpleasant experience, no matter how carefully the designer has pruned out any hint of conflict or quarterbacking. Murray the A**hole Frog doesn’t bother going that direction — one of many tidbits of conventional wisdom Felli chucks into the recycling bin. Instead, it sprints the other way. Rather than minimizing its players’ personalities, it magnifies them. Are you an asshole who hits vulnerable players with that predatory frog? Or are you the sort of person who spreads around the damage? Do you take the hit yourself and thereby pursue a new avenue toward victory? Or do you hoard cards to prevent anybody from toppling your sand castles? During the process of play, one becomes more fully themself.

This hand is getting out of control.

Maybe that’s a fancy-pants way of saying that Murray the A**hole Frog is unusually prone to disruption, but that strikes me as reductive. All rules are tethers, and Felli leaves just enough play in hers to permit players to move in unexpected directions. Everybody follows the same rules; it’s how they follow them that explicates their character.

Either way, Felli has birthed one more peculiarity. This will be one of her more divisive titles, even among adherents to her ludic style. I find it charming and exhilarating for the very same reasons someone else might find it strange and off-putting. It’s the board game equivalent of shitposting, a relic that’s as snarky as it is good-natured. What an a**hole of a thing.

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A complimentary copy was provided.