Two spice dealers are sharing a storehouse which a number of hungry rats are keen on as well. So that they know where everything is, the two dealers want to store spices of the same type together. But they also have to keep the rats at bay. Stack your crates, keep your spices together, and cover up the rats. In Rat Hot, the two players simply take turns to draw 2 tiles from a face down pile, and add them to the existing tiles. The tiles are all 1 by 3, that is they show three squares which might be blank, or hold 4 types of spices, or rats. So a tile might be spice:blank:rat or spice:blank:spice or rat:spice:rat even! The spices and rats are in green or red, and both colors can be mixed on one tile. One player scores for green, the other for red. The game has a bunch of gray and yellow wooden chips, gray equals one point, yellow equals two. Each time you place a tile, you and your opponent can take points, so your second tile can accumulate on your first and you can score points for your opponent on your turn. Whenever you or your opponent get two of the same spice adjacent, you get one point, two points when you get a group of three or more of the same spice. However, if you finish your turn and three rats of your color are still showing, you instantly lose. When the draw pile is exhausted and the tiles all placed, the board is scored once more for all players, so trying to preserve existing groups counts as much as making fresh groups. The real trick in the game comes in the tile placement, of course. Tiles must be adjacent by at least one square, but can face at right angles if you prefer. Tiles can placed on top of other tiles, so that stacks build up. But a tile can not sit exactly on top of another, so there must always be some offset, and crucially, you can never have a gap beneath a tile.