SCRAM: cute cats for everyone

SCRAM is a card game of cute cats, trying to score the best combos.  We goofed the rules the first few rounds, thinking we could have more than one active pile.  But there should be just one active cat, and when you score a cat you move it to your "Cat tree".

The basic gameplay is: draw a card (from draw pile or one of the face-up cards in the "Pet Shop"), then either 1) add a card to your active cat if it's one more than the top card showing, or 2) throw a 0-point "stray cat" on an opponent's pile to slow them down, or 3) if you really have no moves, turn in your full hand and drew 5 new cards.

Now, a stray cat can be immediately blocked by a Scram card, and you can "bank" a cat at any time by moving that pile to your cat tree and starting a new pile.  There are a few STEAL cards in the deck that let you take th top card from an opponent's stack if you can play it right away.

Some of the cat cards have special rules printed on them, like letting you have a 6-card hand instead of the usual 5, or "You cannot play a stray cat on top of this cat" or "If someone plays a 1-point cat, you can steal it."  But the special rule only applies as long as that cat is on top of the pile.  Play another card and you might get a different rule or special move.

That's really all there is to this one.  It's pretty simple, and in our first round playing by the correct rules we both ended up with exactly 60 points each, then Anne had fewer points left in her hand to deduct, so she won the hand.

It was a low-stress game.  Relaxing and a bit funny, with one cute abstract cat after another.  My favorite detail that neither of us noticed for the first hour or so: the cards with a value of 2 or more, which can only be played on top of other cat cards, have an extra pair of paws hanging on around their head or neck ... from the imaginary cats beneath them.  

 

I can see up grabbing this one on some future weekend and tossing more cats around.