Cat Lady

 I got a few games in the past week.  Some have been written up already, but here is the batch:

Cat Lady is yet another card game with cute cats everywhere.  This one is a bit more involved than Scram.  You work from a 3x3 grid of face-up cards, where each turn, each player can take a whole row or column, then move the cat token to block a whole row or column from the next player's turn.  

You can get cat cards or food cards.  The food cards get traded in for food cubes, which go towards feeding those cats.  There are also cat toys, catnip and cat costumes, which score at the end of the turn.  And there are Lost Cat cards: you can trade two Lost Cats in for 2 VP (victory points) or one stray cat.  Each stray cat has a special power like "get 2 VP for each black cat you feed". 

Here we are, halfway through a hand. The main 3x3 grid is in the middle, stray cats below them.  My cat cards are on the left, Ann's are on the right.  I don't think you're supposed to put the food on the cat cards during game play, but it is so annoying trying to keep it mentally tallied that why not just do it this way?

It's a fun series of card grabs.  It is possible to keep the cats fed, and if they get the proper food counts (shown at the bottom of the card) they score the points shown on the left side of the card.  There's a bit too much to tally up at the end of the turn: sets of toys gets scored on way, catnip varies (-2 if you have one, 2-3 give you an extra 2 VP per fed cat and 4 gives you 3 VP per fed cat, if I recall correctly), whoever has the most costumes gets 6 VP.  Then the effects of the stray cats.

I found it easiest to grab a batch of 6-sided dice from my main game box to help add up all the bits and pieces and hairballs at the end of the round.

It is cute and amusing.  A good time spent tossing cards around.

One thing that was nice was that the cards are marked with a little 3+ or 4 in the top right, so during setup if you had only two players you would remove all of those from the deck, and if you had 3 players you would remove all the 4s from the deck, quickly changing the balance of the deck to fit the number of players.  There was also a little letter that gave the cat colors for players who might be color blind.

The art was a bit too generic and would benefit greatly from having more personality.  Cat games need personality.  Goofy fuzzballs that are fun to see each time they come up.


 


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