Cheery Chimp

Chimp Trips

Chimp Trips

How To Play Chimp Trips

A three-player game of memory and nerve — you against two chimps.

The goal

Collect three trios — a trio being three cards of the same rank. Get there first and you win. There's also a shortcut: grab the trio of 7s and you win on the spot.

The cards

  • The deck is 39 cards — the ranks A…K in three suits, so there are exactly three of every rank.
  • You hold a hand of 7 cards, kept sorted low to high. Everyone can see how many cards you have, but not what they are.
  • The other 18 cards sit face-down in the centre, shared by everyone.

Taking your turn

On your turn you flip cards over one at a time, trying to line up three of a rank. Each card you reveal must match the rank of the first one you flipped this turn. You can reveal from three places:

  • the lowest or highest card in any player's hand — only the two ends are reachable (including your own);
  • any face-down centre card.

To take a turn, then:

  1. Flip your first card — that sets the rank you're hunting.
  2. Flip another of the same rank to keep the run alive.
  3. Flip a third of that rank and you've made a trio — those cards are yours and leave the game.
  4. After a trio you choose: keep going for another, or Stop to bank it and pass the turn.

Flip a card that doesn't match and your turn ends at once — everything you revealed this turn flips back face-down, right where it was.

Tapping it out

  • Your hand is face-up; tap its left (low) or right (high) end card.
  • An opponent shows a card back at each end — tap the end you want to peek.
  • Tap any face-down centre card to turn it over.
  • After a trio, a Stop & bank button appears when it's your choice to make.

Reachable spots are highlighted on your turn. Each player's trios show as little rank chips above their hand; the 7 chip is marked out specially.

Winning

  • Three trios in front of you — you win.
  • The 7 trio — an instant win, however many trios you have.

Very rarely a deal locks up with no trio possible for anyone; if that happens the game ends and whoever has the most trios takes it.

Good to know

  • Nothing leaves the table except finished trios, so a missed turn costs you nothing but the information you gave away — everyone saw what you flipped.
  • The chimps remember every card that's been turned over. So do you, ideally.
Tip: the whole game is memory. When an opponent flips their low card to a 9 and misses, file it away — next turn you can reach into their hand for that same 9. Chase ranks you've already glimpsed twice, keep an eye on where the 7s surface, and don't be shy about stopping after one trio when the next flip is a guess.
Contact

Feel free to contact us with any bugs, complaints, or requests.

Aliases for Chimp Trips
Nana and seven
Release Date
August 18, 2026

History

Chimp Trips belongs to one of the oldest families in card gaming: the memory game. Its great-grandparent is Concentration — the childhood classic where cards lie face-down and you flip two at a time hoping for a match. That idea is centuries old and belongs to no one; it has been reinvented endlessly because it needs almost no equipment and no reading, just a good memory and a little nerve.

The modern shape of Chimp Trips comes from a Japanese card game called Nana ("seven"), designed by Kaya Miyano and first published around 2020. Miyano's clever twist was to give each player a small hand kept in sorted order, and to rule that you may only ever reach for the lowest or highest card at either end — of your own hand or anyone else's. Suddenly a pure memory game grew a spine of deduction and push-your-luck: you have to track where the numbers are and decide how far to press before a mismatch ends your turn. Nana was reworked and widely released as Trio in 2023, and in 2024 it won the As d'Or, France's national game-of-the-year award — high praise for such a tiny box.

Chimp Trips is our own clean-room take on that design, built with an ordinary 39-card deck instead of a custom one. The rules that make it sing are the shared inheritance of the whole memory-game tradition; the sorted-hand, reach-only-the-ends idea is Miyano's contribution. As in every version, the middle number — the lucky 7 — is the dramatic heart of the game: collect the three of them and you win on the spot.

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