Cats! The internet cannot get enough of them, and neither can I. Ikea! That’s also a thing people like. Let this handy allen key unlock new heights of near-2D felinity!

Do you remember those logic puzzles where Bob sits opposite a woman wearing a blue hat, Mandy is wearing a hat, and is sat to the right of Alberto, and Reverend Hawksby is deathly allergic to the colour blue, and is wearing only a strategically-positioned lotus flower? I was potentially good at those as a child, but didn’t have the mental room to manoeuver all the pieces. Thinkfun’s Cat Crimes finally enables adult  me to externalise similar logic problems using a crowd of extremely suspicious card kitties.

Have you seen the canary, Ginger?

Similarly to other Thinkfun titles, Cat Crimes offers a 40 pre-set ‘cases’ of increasing complexity. You’ll find ruined shoes, spilled drinks, and absent budgies, and nobody’s paws are clean. The production is phenomenal, the art offers more than mere cuteness, and the pieces are glossy and thick. Even the board has a separate elevated rug section because it’s nicer that way. The game itself has a limited lifespan, as once you’ve solved each puzzle, there’s no more mystery to be found, but Cat Crimes is hardboiled logic with adorable, guilty furballs, and made me feel like a very smart 8 year-old.

The fuzzy face of guilt.

What other hijinks can be had in the world of nigh-2D mogs and Macavitys? Cats love to be high up, loftily perching to stare down upon the naked thicko-kittens that serve them, and Cat Tower invites you to stack them higher still. Dressed in the unmistakable graphics of Aza Chen, Cat Tower is another Best In Show, and another one for children and drunk adults alike. A chunky wooden die dictates how you add foldy-card-cats to the tower until the inevitable ‘critical loss of dignity’ moment when it tumbles.

The Towering In-fur NO.

The aim is to play every card you have, and the tower’s collapse brings a penalty, not the game’s end, still it’s not going to outlast short attention spans, and there’s some potential for mildly nobbling other players. The Kickstarter edition includes both the Cat Tower Plus and Cat Tower Lite variants and their lack of availability at retail has limited the game’s potential. There are a few other tweaks to what is a very well-worn formula, but as sweet as it is, Cat Tower pales next to the tension and sheet physical heights of HABA’s Rhino Hero.

Ask not for whom the paw rolls

A cat’s daily routine isn’t all antics and mischief. Fortunately for everyone, Toppy Noppy has produced a collection of modest trapezoidal monuments to feline inertia: Cats on Stuff. This is a sharply printed, and precisely cut collection of indifferent papercraft moggies, and places for them to stubbornly sit. Requiring neither knife, nor glue, you can reenact accurate cat obstructions with a few simple folds and tab-tucks.

Pads on a pad

Will you choose ‘large cat on too-small box,’ ‘fluffy shedding on clean t-shirt,’ or the timeless ‘small, but immovable cat on warm laptop’? I’m particularly fond of the cuddly, smug cat, and the boss-eyed maniac. Simplicity is the key to Toppy Noppy designs, focusing on simple, sharp angles, clean lines, and bold patches of colour; this isn’t a construction challenge.

Boxcommander Fluffums surveys the field

I could call Cats on Stuff a cute desk toy, or a fun gift, and both of these things are true, but I found myself minutely adjusting the position of each cat until they looked just right as if installing an art exhibition in my own desk-based, cat-centric gallery. Though small and lightweight, the cats appear monolithic, inscrutable, and defiant. They are Cats. They are on Stuff. Your Stuff.

A Cat. On a Stuff.

Your move, human.

Board games and a medieval setting; the cheese and crackers of the table-top! Farming! Economics! Commerce! Mayhap some flax! But beneath the cheerily constructive historical tinkering, there are avaricious, power-hungry backstabbers lurking in the shadows. Hold onto coin purse strings, we’re going to Slyville.

The third title from relative newcomers Hexy Studio (Star Scrappers: Cave In, Hard City,) Slyville sees 3 to 5 rival guilds racing to gain influence over the titular medieval town. If you can successfully balance bluffing, timing, and the judicious application of blade to spine, then you’ll become the favoured guild of the capricious Prince and win the game. The city, rendered by Przemysław Gul, and given colourful life by Gul and Tomasz Larek, helps distinguish medieval Slyville from the multitude of similar settings. I especially enjoy the threat of the sawn-through stool on the Sabotage card.

Ayyy! Sit on it!

The heart of the game is a deck of seven cards, and the decisions, not only of which four (three in a 5-player game) you will play, and into which districts, but the manner in which you do so. Poker-face an Acquisition card into an uncontested spot to gain a good you need later, quietly seed a district with a Sabotage card to protect your upcoming Big Deal, or mislead the table by boldly slapping down a hopeless Small Deal; all the while trying to read your opponents’ moves and keep track of what goods lie on each player’s board. Once the districts are resolved, the cheesy grins and muttered cursing around the table will tell the truth of each game’s turn. The Prince’s Favourite (First Player) has the opportunity to further meddle by seeding the board with a Prince’s Decree, it’s effect on the turn known only to them until the latter phase of the turn, when the regions are resolved.

There is a lot I like about Slyville; Its engaging mix of forward planning, reading the table, bluffing, and luck reminds me pleasantly of Mission: Red Planet. It’s easy to learn, moves along at a fair clip, and always proceeds toward the 100-point goal, eschewing the grinding tug-of-war of games like Munchkin. Nobody is ever out of the race for long, the players don’t fight to balance the game, the board state doesn’t change chaotically, and your seven cards return to you each turn, ready to scheme anew. Similarly, your goods-gathering Henchman might be displaced, or exiled from the city entirely, but are soon back in the fray with a timely Takeover card. The Prince’s Favourite  resolves ties, and may be influenced by the other players, but we found they frequently default to supporting their own interests, or those of the player in the weakest position.

If this seems rather mild, it’s because it rather is.

The wealth of a city, in my ham-like grasp!

Slyville’s metagame revolves around convincing the Prince’s Favourite to act in your favour, or against an opponent. The only tools available to do this are promises of mutual back-scratching, or Brutal threats. Our group found that with the lack of any concrete bribes, table talk had minimal impact, but other groups may bring this aspect to life. There’s definitely a niche for a ‘mean family game’ where the stakes feel lower, the penalties less harsh, but Slyville has traded some drama along with chaos, to achieve its aim. This reduced amplitude between the peaks and troughs of glee and frustration risks the game falling between the cracks if it doesn’t reach its audience quickly. This is, I feel, the biggest challenge facing Slyville. With almost 10,000 games being produced annually, the window for a game to make its mark is extremely slim. Slyville feels complete and well-realised, appealing without gimmickry, or acres of plastic, though it can feel that this fox is stealing chicken nuggets, not raiding the hen house.

We built this city on enforced acquisition of material goods!

If the sneaky city of Slyville intrigues you, pre-orders will be open soon, and Hexy Studio will have final production copies ready at Essen 2019, booth 5-K105.

Notes on components:
This preview is of a prototype copy of the game. The art is close to finalised, but the components are subject to change. The iconography is clear and logical, though the colour-blind-proofing of the game could be improved if it extended to the player boards and main board districts. I would like to see the Goods tokens matched to the squares on the player boards, as they’re currently very small. I’d also like to see the Takeover and Goods Pile spaces on the main board outlined identically to the card placement spots for consistency’s sake. It was pointed out to me by another player that the art for Ulrika Krieger (Red Ruffians Gang) has her head in an impossible position and angle, and I cannot now un-see it.

Disclaimer: Hexy Studio kindly supplied a prototype of Slyville for the purpose of this preview.

Step lively, Rocketeers! Time to show how keen Earthlings can be!

Space! It is, mostly, but between the stardust and dead satellites lies adventure for those brave, well-groomed few who don the velour of the Rocket Patrol. Space also contains Cadets. Who go on Missions. Away. Space Cadets: Away Missions promises adventure and thrills in the wide, black yonder for you and your chums, but does it provide derring-do, or a herring, red? Smoke me a kipper, skipper, and I’ll tell you.

A fresh, pleasant morning in the Rocket Patrol: everything shipshape!

Space Cadets: Away Missions has little besides theme to tie it to previous Space Cadets games, and is a love letter to old-timey pulp sci-fi. Players cooperate to challenge an alien menace in all its forms, from squishy to chitinous, and ultimately save the day! The components offer a pleasing toybox of plastic figures, and clear, if a little dull, counters and board tiles, with a rulebook and reference sheets that are complete and concise.

Set up one of 16 scenarios, move heroes, roll dice, get stuff, move the monsters – on the surface level, SC:AM is a pale dot in the firmament of dice-and-miniatures titles, but by strictly limiting the fussiness of action points, status effects, dice modifiers, and random events SC:AM enables players to focus on decision making, and enjoying the bloody game. The design clarity and attention to detail is evident from the paired dice colours (you most commonly roll multiple pairs of dice for Saucerman attacks) to the airtight logic of the “AI” pathfinding. Everything is there to keep the situation clear and bring gameplay to the fore. It’s a testament to the design that SC:AM smoothly puppeteers no less than seven different rubber-suit aliens, each with their own behaviour, without taking longer than the players’ turn to do it.

A short while later: “Good job, crew! I’m right behind you!”

The result is an engaging, fun cooperative puzzle, in which dice luck never feels like it’s commanding the bridge, but affectionately chatting to the engines down in engineering. There are extrastellar threats and brave heroics, melon-headed Saucermen and brains-in-jars, jail-breaks, Hive Queens, and the Tunnel of Terror, all of it presented neatly and shipshape, as befits a true Rocketeer. Curiously, while the game plays with up to six, I’ve had the most enjoyment using four characters in my solitaire games, where the order of activations, and timing of abilities really shines. Like many cooperative games, there’s only the players themselves to limit a single person calling all the shots, and with no hands of cards, nor other hidden elements, SC:AM risks an emergent Game Commander. If everyone is on the same page, however, it is unforgettable fun to yank the tinfoil hat from a mind-enslaved human Thrall, wire it up to a chunk of Mysterium, and teleport to safety – just like in the movies!

Merry! Um…Happy! Err…it’s March.
Welcome, welcome, friends. Welcome to twenty-oughty-one-ety-seven. It’s a year AND SO MUCH MORE! But before I reveal what stupefying, death defying, shallow frying things the late-twenty-teens have in store for us all, THIS:

Midnight, January 1st, 2000. A slightly tipsy, definitely teenaged voice – maybe mine – from behind my parents’ sofa asks “Where’s my hovercar?”. As it turned out, the future was not one of shiny rockets and derring-do, but more akin to Pulp’s increasingly sobering Disco 2000. Still, in 2016 the non-stick futurama of the Rocket Patrol was heroically enacted on my battered table-top in Space Cadets: Away Missions.

Related by theme only to Space Cadets and Space Cadets: Dice Duel, Away Missions takes the dicey-dungeon-crawl formula into a hex-hopping, alien bopping, laser plopping game of tactical Dan Dareoism in a future that’s neither GRIM, nor DARK; favouring coke-bottle rocketships, bubble helmets and butt-chins you could lose a 5p coin in. From first contact on a mining colony, to the far-flung Invisible Planet via a thrilling space-jail breakout and the Tunnel of Terror, SC:AM (unfortunate acronym) joyously checks off outlandish pulp sci-fi clichés in it’s dog-eared I-Spy book and is home in time for astro-scones.

Gear up your crew for one of the 16 scenarios then, with the help of four pairs of sparkly D10s, scan-move-and-shoot until you are successful or dead. A typical turn sees you scan (flip over) a board hex tile, add aliens and items to it, then take actions allowing you to move, attack, use your Overkill ability, and interact with your fellow crew and the board. Once every Rocketeer has had a bit of fun, the alien turn begins and the attention to detail of SC:AM glitters. The game handles as smooth as the soapiest of space operas, resolving up to 7 unique alien AI types in a refreshingly logical manner. After a mere handful of plays I needed neither the rulebook, nor the still-unused-but-welcome reference sheets.

The simplicity of the rules allows you to focus on tackling the challenge of the game itself – and like most cooperative games it definitely feels like a puzzle to be solved. You choose on the fly who will go first, second and so on, allowing you to change your plan based on how each player’s turn pans out. The heart (of Gold) and soul of the puzzle is the aforementioned Overkills which turn excess die roll successes into freebie actions based on your rocketeer’s innate ability, weapons, and even the different alien types. Overkills can be spent in any combination, giving a lot of potential for fun combos; Failed to kill that ominous Brain-in-a-Jar? Get the Professor to open the door, so the Chief can Strafe and blast it. Missing that vital teleporter component? The First Officer can tell the Captain to Move Out and bring it to you! Concerned about that hidden Leader herding endless Saucer Men at you next turn? Shoot his friend and stun him with their dying Psychic Scream! I have had some truly memorable skin-of-my-teeth victories where we’ve seen the exact order of operations which will save everyone’s velour-clad butts and they have involved everything from a Soft-Focus Lens to manipulating gravity itself. However, if but one of your brave crew runs out of oxygen or ‘being alive’ then the whole mission fails; our on your own out there, Rocketeers, make a wrong move and you’ll be lost in space!

Aliens to the left of me, aliens to the right…

For what was a hefty price tag of around £60 (a sum now dwarfed by other Kickstarters and recent Brexit-inflicted hikes up into the £80+ range) SC:AM gives you a lot of competent, if not altogether exciting cards, chits, and tiles. The artwork is clean and functional, if rather bland on the board tiles, while the character art hits a pleasantly pulpy note while remaining on the right side of silliness. The inevitable miniatures shade toward the ‘playing piece’ end of the scale, but are sturdy, well-defined, and serve the gameplay well. Each model is easy to identify by colour, shape, and size, from tiny Bugs to the ‘rubber-chicken-meets-Predator’ Sentinel, with perhaps the exception of the Thralls’ colouring which needed really to be distinct from the similarly-sized Saucermen. A special mention has to be made of the Brain-in-a-Jar, which is indeed a three-part model of a tiny think-bulb in a clear containment tube. Gross, but cool!

The scenarios offer a slightly vague narrative arc, and with no campaign system in place to carry things through the missions the plot could have used a little more fleshing out in the flavour text. The 16 scenarios offer plenty of variety, from a solo suicide run, to expunging all alien life from an infested rocket, and minor rules tweaks are used to switch up the formula and keep players on their toes. This isn’t to say that Away Missions relies upon cheap B-picture tricks to surprise you; I was more than happy with its sparing use of random events, which are limited to one instance each and can be accounted for in your plan, though they may or may not turn up in the tile draw.

It seems that GRIMDARK sci-fi still rules the space-waves and the more gaudy, bright space adventures of the Rocket Patrol haven’t caught the gaming world’s imaginations quite so easily. Space Cadets: Away Missions may not have been the biggest blip on anyone’s view screen, but I’ve returned to it time and again, clocking up over 30 hours of play, mostly as a solo game. The game scales well, though I feel that it plays best with four characters, which can easily be handled by one, or two players. It’s easy enough to learn and play, but with a surprisingly food-pill meatiness to the tactical decisions each turn, and yes, there are dice, but I’ve rarely felt that they’ve been the deciding factor in my wins and losses.

If you fancy an adventure beyond the stars, meeting and blasting new and exciting creatures and nicking their stuff, then this future dungeoncrawl-o-rama may well be enough to get you strapping on your Robbie’s Rocket Pants and jetting off into the black. If you’re looking for a solitaire game and have a few extra credits to splash around, then Danger! Away Missions might siren-sing you behind an asteroid and have it’s way with your wallet. If, like me, you’re tired of the FUTUREOFWAR style seriousness of science-fiction board games and want an adventure with your buddies where the ability to open a door is actually really important then sign yourselves up for a tour in the Rocket Patrol!

Today I will be trying not to make any references to the male genitalia as I discuss Package!?

2016 continues apace, mowing down celebrities left and right, even stretching a tendril to snatch away one of our much-loved furry family members. Occasionally penetrating the persistent, oppressive gloom are bright shafts of joy; this year saw my brother’s marriage, the birth of my daughter, and my bro and his wife just recently announcing a child of their own – congratulations again, Bee and Monkey! The playing of games remains a point of stability for me against this chiaroscuro of deathly shade and celestial laser beams, and none presented me with a more perplexing puzzle than Package!?.

In Package!? you deliver food to famished punters, dropping off sausagey treats and cheesy batons to any of five scoring locations. As your spies’ briefcases pile up at the drop points, actions will trigger to redistribute your opponents’ crates of meat and veg to other harbours, which may trigger further shuffling of letters into other post boxes in a pleasing cascade of events. When the final cage of animals is unloaded at the zoo, the game ends and you will ask me what the bollocks I’m talking about.

You see, this game is about delivering things to places – the specifics are left to your foetid imagination. Using only minimal components, Package!? is a fast-paced, 1-4 player abstract game in which you deliver the titular items to locations, worth one to five end-game points. Your options, initially constrained to seeding the board, are dictated by the roll of a standard D6 and cause your coloured wooden “packages” to be placed, moved, and removed, sometimes triggering further actions. It’s neither long, nor hard to grasp, but is nonetheless an intriguing and strangely addictive exercise in logic and luck.

Unusually for an abstract game, player turns in Package!?  revolve around the roll of a die, in fact, my early games felt like they played themselves: Roll die, place cube, repeat. Often I’d go through the list of options and think “I can do A, B, or C, but A is impossible, and B is stupid, so….” You’re given your options, and frequently the decisions you make feel either simple, or are made willy-nilly and what you want to do may be confounded by the die roll. However, the game has a mathematical heart: the number three.

For starters, scoring is restricted to three cubes at locations four and five, capping off their maximum scoring potential, and making location three desirable for both its unlimited scoring, and the potential to bump cubes up a notch (to four or five) increasing their value. Cubes in a location at game-end also score two points for each set of three, but threes are vulnerable as an opponent can potentially junk one of them out of the game entirely. Delivering a third cube to a location also allows you to wang a cube down to the next lowest location, or eject it from play, too. It’s a game of granular gains and losses; of forming sets, and of leaving spaces for sets to form; of being able to nobble your opponent now, or setting them up to hurt themselves later; of taking high-scoring locations early and becoming a target, or lurking at a lower location and edging upward.

It’s neither dice game, nor deterministic abstract, and I suspect that Package!? will cause many people to cock their head on first blush, as it did me. Similarly to Kingdom Builder’s ‘flip a card and place three pieces’, it’s easy to feel the game commands you to do as it says and no more, but I can feel that there is genuine gameplay in this tidy little box, with its neat and classic components, even if I’m not sure I can quite grasp it. A lot of thought and time has been spent on this, well, package, and it has been designed to play virtually anywhere, at any time.

In short, Package!? feels a like an exclusive club; I’m curious to sidle in the door and abuse the bar facilities, but I’m not sure I’ll ever learn the handshake well enough to become a full member. If you fancy paying the (very reasonable) entrance fee, you can find the Kickstarter page here; it’s well over-funded, with just under a week to go.
Disclosure: A preview copy of Package!? was kindly provided by the designer for this article.

Britain’s flopping about in the sea, Mr. Punch is the president elect, and I ran out of whisky!

Ah, board games! What would this fine country be without the quintessential activity of the white-middle-classes! What? No, not that activity, it’ll ruin the carpets.

How does one write about board games these days? There are plenty of voices offering their opinions and reviews, reporting on the latest news and new releases, or merely parroting press release copy spammed out to them via email, so what makes my particular message worth corking into a bottle and tossing amidst the waves? Is it worth the wear on my fingertips and scant free time to yank up the sash and honk some words into the busy street of the internet?

Being of a generally positive disposition, I like to think I might somewhat influence a pigeon. Anyway, the window’s open now, letting in a rather brisk gif, so here are some ways in which I have happily frittered my time while 2016 collapsed into near-dystopian sci-fi nonsense:

Sausage Negotiator! Hostage. Hostage. Hostage Negotiator. 10-15 minutes of surprisingly tense, solitaire card-and-dice play. Armed with Cool Shades and a goatee, you must Hold a Telephone in Interesting Ways to save the lives of (at least half of) the innocents and capture or splatter one of three abductors. It initially feels like a standard dice chucker in a fancy turtleneck, but there’s enough genuine gameplay to be worth conceding a slice of your lunch hour, hitting all the expected movie tropes; you’ll keep the abductor calm, listen to their demands, even call in a sniper, or rush the building if you have to – though sometimes the maths works out such that you kind of want the last couple of hostages to conveniently snuff it so that you can win the game.

Pictured: Failure.

In a manner similar to many co-op games, Bratwurst Blagger Hostage Negotiator revolves around managing a worsening situation while generating ‘conversation points’ to buy useful one-shot cards for future rounds. Your options are relatively few, but the decisions you make feel like they genuinely matter; you can pursue obvious short term gains, card-burning ‘hail mary’ schemes, even multiple-turn plots, which may, or may not disintegrate due to the frustrations of the aptly named event-card-cum-game-timer Terror Deck. The abductor’s demands add the nifty twist of trading you brief windows of hope for permanent handicaps, and the game setup is semi-random to keep you on your toes. The core box contains three different nefarious people-hoarders with their own special rules to mix things up yet further, with more available in the four slightly pricey 16-card expansions.

About the theme: the hostages are sometimes killed, and in one case the hostages are a class of kids. The treatment is generally well-considered, neither cartoonishly broad, nor ghoulishly realistic, and while you do get a Die Hard-esque cool-headed terrorist, and ‘crazy teacher Pushed Too Far’, the abductors are given back story beyond “is a baddie” – one is even surprisingly sympathetic. In terms of diversity and representation my main frown was at the conversation cards, which represent you, the player, talking directly to the abductor. The art for the negotiator unnecessarily gives you a specifically white, male in-game presence. The negotiator has no independent character, nor back-story; there’s no use for him, nor his receding hairline. Cool shades though. The characters in the game (and it’s currently released expansions) are mostly male, though the soon to be released sequel Hostage Negotiator: Crime Wave stars an (again, unnecessary) female negotiator on all conversation cards. It, and its wave of expansions, deliberately include more female antagonists to redress the balance, while somewhat oddly introducing a a mix of male and female gendered hostage meeples, replacing the original’s perfectly appropriate, neutral pawns. Maybe they just want the player to identify more personally with them when one of those little wooden bits “dies”.

So that’s good, is it?

Production quality is pretty high throughout, including custom moulded dice and well-finished wooden bits. The player board is sturdy, though the cards are a shade thin. My copy of the game had a nasty gouge down the edge of the card deck, but Van Ryder Games replaced them swiftly and politely – thanks guys! it’s also worth noting that the designer actively supports the game on Boardgamegeek, responding quickly to rules queries and general questions.

Ultimately, while Hostage Negotiator doesn’t venture beyond the well-worn co-op template, it distils that style of play into a short, focused thriller of a game. It’s a sound framework, allowing neat variations through small tweaks to the game’s core rules. Yes, the card and dice luck can derail your plans, but the level of randomness feels right to me and there are ways to use the cards which can mitigate, or even dodge the dice altogether. Never before has such a small, dice-based title put me on a hotplate, and made me feel that the choices I made really mattered, even to the point of being genuinely stressful.

If you don’t like dice, then Hostage Negotiator won’t change your mind, but despite some thematic wonkiness in places I am impressed at how invested I have been in the lives and deaths of a handful of little, yellow, wooden tokens. I’ll happily concede my time to the demands of this little banger, even when the bock is ticking and the wurst is yet to come!

Crushed beneath my mighty, unreliable justice!

But the cat came back the very next day…

Why hello there! I do apologise for my abrupt absence, but about a fortnight after my last post I underwent a significant upgrade to Dad 2.0 (2.2 if you count our cats, but more on them later) and have been rather occupied with raising an extra child, working more hours, and pursuit of unconscious oblivion for at least 3 hours out of every 24.

Today’s review is brought to you courtesy of Fireside Games, who have thrown their cat hat into the ring in the form of Here, Kitty, Kitty!, a game of cardplay and cat acquisition. Can this be the One True Cat-Game about which I have previously mews mused, or is it the pile of something vile into which I put my naked toes at about 4am yesterday morning, thank you very much, Missy? Time to take the small, plastic spade of investigative diligence and scoop the poop of truth from the litter box of questionable metaphor!

Here, Kitty, Kitty! is a game for two to six players. Actually, it’s a game for three to six players. Well, it’s more like a game for three to five players, with a minor variant for six players and another for two, which the rulebook includes, but doesn’t recommend. From that opening statement it is clear we are into cat-mind-games territory already. Thankfully, the gameplay is as easy as 1, 2, cat…no, really, it is; you and (let’s just say ‘some’ other players) spend two actions per turn to lure cats from the central ‘neighbourhood’ pool onto your respective ‘property’ player boards, or play cards for a variety of game effects, scoring greater amounts of points the further toward the house the cats move. Bonus points are awarded for collecting particular quantities and colours of cat, and whoever has the most points when the deck runs out, wins.

Pictured: Actual satellite photo of my house.

At this point, you could be forgiven for hearing the jangling alarm bell triptych of ‘cute theme’, ‘short, light filler game’, and ‘nice components ‘, and writing Here, Kitty, Kitty! off as a drop in the bucket of pretty-but-empty card games, and I must admit I was guilty of the exact same thoughts. Happily, a closer look at the game’s fluffy underbelly reveals a welcome level of care and thought, and an understanding of what can only be called ‘the cat experience’. First and foremost, the game knows what it is and what it wants to do; it plays short and snappy, with clear actions and card effects, and a level of ‘Take THAT!’ interaction which feels fair and meaningful, rather than arbitrary and mean. With only a single card deck and a hand of three cards per turn, there’s no room for weak cards, resulting in no ‘bad hands’ and even if you don’t want to play cards, you can still move cats as an action, so no turns are wasted by a default discard-and-draw. There are random Instant Card ‘events’, but they mostly act to limit the leaders and boost those players who are lagging behind. The movement of the cats within properties and around the table feels very natural for indecisive, wandering moggies, and neither too chaotic, nor random.

All Cats Are Grey…and black. Also orange.

Here, Kitty, Kitty! claws itself further up in its scoring. Many games would have stopped with the 0/3/5 points for the yard/porch/house positioning of cats, but the four additional scoring conditions bring an unexpected tactical, even mildly strategic edge to the gameplay. You have to pay attention to your goals, the state of the other players’ boards, and the long-term effect cards, such as Foster Kittens, which, if used carelessly, can affect the colour balance of the cats in your house and lose you a hefty 10 points – If you don’t pay attention then you will miss out on valuable end-game bonuses.

Another trick up the cat’s pyjama sleeves lies in the game’s art, which is both varied – all but a few cards have unique illustrations – and colourful. The player boards are all graphically distinct, clearly zoned, and marked with the relevant points values, and the beautifully sculpted cat figures, which are cast in three different poses, stylistically match the card art exactly. It’s cartoony, graphically sharp, and appealing without being too corny. It has to be noted though, that some of the cat pawns have the sprue attachment stubs in a very uncomfortable place that I can’t wholeheartedly believe is accidental…

Cat owners will know this view.

Finally, and in some ways of most importance, is that the designer of this game clearly both loves, and more importantly understands cats; not just the cute, fluffy, big-eyed side of cats, but the dead-bird-on-the-mat, tripped-out-on-catnip, 3am yowling, hairball-erupting side. The cards are, in the most part, appropriately themed to their mechanics, and playing the game drew laughs and knowing looks from all the cat owners in the group. Here, Kitty, Kitty! is a family game, sure, but it knows its felines, and represents them in a fond and not overly saccharine way.

Varying shades of cat reality.

I’ve banged on for quite a while about what is really a simple, short game, but I feel that it deserves recognition for the work and care that has gone into making it the best that it can be. It’s not without its flaws – the aforementioned 2 and 6 player games are weak, there’s a pointless, Fluxx-ish ‘pass a card to the right’ event, and the card stock feels flimsy for a game that seems aimed at families and younger players – but it should not be dismissed as merely a kid’s game, or a gimmick. Here, Kitty, Kitty! may not reinvent the wheel, but it is a solid entry in the family/filler game bracket, avoiding the usual genre pitfalls of dictated turns, game length and shallowness with a deft paw.

Disclosure: Here, Kitty, Kitty! was kindly supplied by Fireside Games for the purpose of this review.

Board game boxes contain a lot of information to help you decide whether this is a game for you. They also frequently lie their lids off, the boxy buggers!

Part of my job as a game shop denizen (official term) is to enter the information from new games’ boxes into our shop database. You might expect that this would be a useful resource to the average weary traveller (not an official term), but these ‘box blurbs’ are generally composed of two things:

1. Bullshit
2. Statistics

The bullshit takes the form of a game’s description; its attempt to chat-up your idle ‘just browsing’ into serious purchase commitment. Unfortunately, being bullshit, these are often the same eye-rolling come-ons you’ve read a thousand times before:

• The Life Story: Often takes the form of an unnecessarily long and detailed Tale of Epic Events, especially if the game involves a fantasy setting in which everyone is having a big scrap over a deceased king’s favourite chair and hat. May initially seem impressive until you realise how much the dullard likes to hear itself talk.
• The Wacky Superfuntime!!!!: OMG How could you resist the Awesomely Awesome AWESOMENESS of this rib-tickling, side-splitting game of FUN, Hilarity, and *SO RANDOM* non-sequiturs?!? Eye-catching, for sure, but this attention-seeking behaviour rapidly becomes grating.
• The Mission Statement: Invariably begins “In this game, players take on the role of…”and proceeds to clinically lay out a step-by-step plan for your relationship with the game. Nice to know where you stand, I guess, but kills any romance stone dead.
• The List of Assets: How many cards? That’s so great. Really? more than 200 coloured cubes? Wow. And a rulebook? So you’ve got a detailed list of every single component? That don’t impress-a-me much.

…and then we have the statistics. H.P. Lovecraft-inspired co-op Arkham Horror box-boasts “For 1 to 8 Players” allowing anything from a cozy night of squamous terror with your favourite fellow mammal, to a full esoteric weirdness party. It doesn’t mention that the game has many moving parts, and involves plenty of table-talk and flavour text reading, so given, say, 2 minutes per player, you’ll be almost a quarter of an hour closer to death by your next turn.

Never play with more than 5! REVISE it again!

Sticking with the temporal theme, game boxes often show a clock, hourglass, or other similar device handily displaying the fraction of your lifespan required to complete the game. Kanban bare-facedly suggests a play time of 60-120 minutes. This is not unreasonable if you play at competition level and have the stewards set the game up before hand; even with the minimum number of players, tea breaks, brain cramps and cats-jumping-on-tables, this is not a game you can sensibly wrap up within an hour.

You lie, sir! And furthermore, my car will not play this game with me.

So far I’ve been all grumpy Mr. Problems and not his shiny, ‘probably bald because I’m envisioning Mr. Clean right now’ alter-ego Solutionman, so let’s look at what can be done. The bullshit is a stylistic balancing act of scene-setting flavour, accurate description, and factual information, but as with cinema, ‘show, don’t tell’ should be the adage. Like a movie poster, a game box should not be a novel, nor a technical manual, nor a shopping list and your average game box has plenty of room for pictures and to-the-point text. I’m not fan of Munchkin as a game, but the box is refreshingly no-bullshit.

Fantasy theme, humour, and the basic gameplay. Got it.

Statistics need to be reliable, appropriate, and useful. Listing the number of players is stating a fact, but  ‘Designed to play best with X players’ can be compared to your own circumstances. In terms of game length, a listing of amount of time per player is thankfully more common these days and is in my opinion the way forward. Ultimately, game boxes exist to sell you a game and will endeavour to show off its best side, but less is more if you want to charm your game’s way into my metaphorical pants and honesty is always the key to my cheap-Ikea-shelf-unit heart.

Cats! Darlings of the internet and scourge of rodents (except for the Capybara). So why is there such a dearth of properly cat-themed games?

There have been plenty of cat-related games released over the years, including the recent Kittens in a Blender, Exploding Kittens, and a fair chunk of the design career of Aza Chen, but it’s hard to find games that feature cats in more than a shallow way. Felinia unconvincingly shoehorned cats into a standard Renaissance trading game with no catnip mice to be see, while Hot Tin Roof more successfully applied a cat theme to its light, abstract gameplay, but still none have truly captured the full feline scope of poise, grace, hilarity, disgust, and violence.

Is it even possible to design a truly catty game? In The Unadulterated Cat, Terry Pratchett observed the real-world phenomenon of Cat Chess, a game which may be “…going on at some mystically higher level unobtainable by normal human minds…” and perhaps this is the problem. In order to make cats a thematic fit, designers have thus far applied broad stereotypes – having 9 lives, chasing mice, hating water and so on. I believe that these clichés are used to protect their sanity, for to create a comprehensive cat game one would have to try and comprehend the swirling madness residing in the furry buggers’ minds.

I’m now going to attempt to do exactly that and suggest some ideas for designers to create a ‘proper’ cat game:

1. Setup: Place your cat on top of a heat source space, under a bed tile, close-but-not-that-close to another cat in play, or somewhere unknown to the other players, who must then attempt to find your cat while you attempt to sneak it onto the board and claim it was there all along.
2. Worker Placement:  Your cat may be moved at any time, but probably won’t. Cats must make a mandatory move to the kitchen space when a player flips the fridge door card to its Open side, or even vaguely hints that they might do so. Cats must also move noisily to a random space if the time is 3am and all the players are asleep.
3. Dexterity: At any time during the game, players are encouraged to gently and repeatedly tap at a game piece of their choosing whilst wearing an expression of acute concentration, mixed with mild bafflement and alarm. If the game piece falls onto the floor, the player who knocked it down must cease to care.
4. Bluffing: When a player declares that they are moving their cat to an outside space, any other player may call their bluff by flipping the exterior door card from its Closed side to its Open side. The moving player then responds by making a number of moves across the door card with their cat. The number of moves must be in a range from zero to infinity.
5. Party Game: If during their turn a player suffers an hilarious momentary loss of dignity, then it never actually happened. The player was clearly washing/somewhere else/Being Very Interested In A Thing.
6. Social Deduction: If you intend to design a game exploring the mind games of cats, then you are probably insane and should seek help immediately.

I suspect the real explanation as to why no games capture what it is to be a moggy, is that games need rules and cats abide by their own. Your average, unassuming goldfish-terrorist simply has no use for the restrictions of the human world and will do as they damn well please…or maybe Pratchett was right and we simply could not conceive of a game of suitable elegance, subtlety, malevolence, and perhaps genius to do Our Fluffy Overlords justice.

The tidal wave of plastic miniatures I spoke of back here shows no signs of breaking and while many are happily surfing atop it, I can’t help but question whether, like this surfing metaphor, game components could stand to be more appropriate.
One of the strongest lures that led me astray from the screen-absorption of video games was the inherently tactile, physical nature of table-top games. The components of a game can significantly affect a gameplay experience, and even become a defining part of the game itself. Publishers understand many players’ wont to embellish their games, and premium quality components are pretty commonplace now, but I’m interested in how well-suited they are for use in games.

Though not as thematically apt, or visually pleasing as, say, plastic gemstones, the origin of Splendor’s poker chips as a form of coinage conveys their purpose as the game’s currency; the chips’ practical, weighty physicality gives a feeling of value expressive of the gem-trading theme. They add so much to the experience of that game that I have read of more than one instance of someone handling the chips, even while playing the phone app. The rug-placement game Marrakech uses fabric strips to represent carpets in a market. Like Splendor, it’s a semi-abstract game, but while just as serviceable as card tiles, the tiny ‘carpets’ convey the game’s theme via tactile means. Recent title Abyss uses plastic pearls as its currency; the pearls are appropriate to its under-sea theme, and pleasant to look at, but have a tendency to roll, scatter, and attract wayward cat paws: they lack practicality. The use of hard plastic for the true-15mm scale miniatures in The Great War coupled with printed, wooden dice conjure up a memorably serious tone befitting its World War One setting which more elaborate, softer plastic figures and regular D6s could not. Even from these few examples it’s clear that theme can be expressed or impacted by different components and materials, nevertheless, the current trend seems to be toward realism in game components.

Especially among Kickstarted games, plastic miniatures are becoming the default ‘realistic’ component upgrade. Miniatures can add a striking visual presence to the board As a material, plastic is durable, capable of holding fine detail, and is a sympathetic material for more modern, or exaggerated themes, but plastic minis are usually cast in an unpainted block colour, often grey. Without an investment of time, skill, materials, and effort to gain the full effect, miniatures can negatively affect the practicality and theme of a game. Gears of War: The Board Game suffers from nigh-indistinguishable player miniatures, and some games (including one of my favourites) include coloured plastic bases to identify pieces, solving a problem which could have been avoided by a different choice of playing piece. Games with a more ‘Euro’ style have also moved toward realism, retaining familiar wooden pieces, but reshaping them from cubes and cylinders to simple forms of animals, buildings, or produce. This form of ‘realistic’ game piece reduces the abstraction of theme, but retains both it’s sympathetic material and functionality. Carcassonne is arguably the originator of this with its now-iconic humanoid Follower ‘Meeples’.

This blog post was sparked by playing Blood Rage – a surprisingly ‘Euro’ design, topped with copious amounts of plastic. I didn’t feel that miniatures added anything to the Norse mythological theme and questioned what I would use in their stead: For me, if a game is going to invoke the fury of battle, the end of the world, and Norse gods and monsters, let it be more classical, less Hollywood. Earthy materials, such as leather, wood, stone and steel should be present, the pieces similar to those in a Hnefatafl (bless you!) set. The components should have weight and purpose, and if anything, less polish.

Game components and the materials they are made of help to make games memorable. Having played with both the original wooden blocks, and the more modern tiles of Hive, the cool, smooth, satisfyingly ‘clacky’ bakelite pieces cemented the game’s identity in my mind. They have a weight similar to poker chips, or Chess pieces, which makes moves feel more decisive and ‘weighty’ too. I would love to see games designers considering the use of more diverse materials to tap our sensory memory, as long as they are appropriate to their game’s concept, aesthetic, and usability. The elephant in the room is, of course, the cost of such things, but with Kickstarted games regularly raising over $1,000,000 it seems that the possibilities are limitless.