Cats & Boxes (Smart Games, 2022)

At the Julian Toy Chest, there were a few games in a series of "1 player puzzle games."  I was able to pass up some of them, but how could I say no to Cats & Boxes with a cute cover like this?

We don't normally do one player games, or games that are actually puzzles (not games).  But the very first things I blogged here was Cat Crimes, which, while it was supposed to be multiple players taking turns doing puzzles, we just played all the puzzles together.  And in this case, a fresh set of puzzle to play together sounded like fun.

This one is very simple.  There is a 5x5 game board, 5 cats, and 4 irregular tiles with empty boxes attached.  The puzzle book has sixty puzzles ranging from simple to expert (like usual for these types of games).  Here, the feel of the puzzles is unlike anything we have played before.

Follow the layout of the puzzle in the puzzle book -- just setup the board as shown.  Then you are given a minimum number of moves.  Each move means taking on of the multi-tile pieces and rotating and moving it, or both.  The trick is that the box tile has to cover a cat, or it's not a value move.  So the cats end up getting into the boxes from below.

Puzzle 1, 2 and 3 were good intro puzzles.  For kicks, we hopped to puzzle 42 to see if they got significantly more difficult or not, and yeah, they really do.  Puzzle 42 can be solved in a minimum of 11 steps.  Every step of the solution is laid out at the end of the puzzle book.  We got the first 3 moves and got stuck, and when we followed those 11 moves, wow ... the pieces did end up putting all the cats in their boxes, but there were a lot of moves between we just were not seeing.

There are hours of fun and frustrations left in this little box of cuteness.  I'm sure we will pop it open again sometime and try to figure out some more of them, but maybe not the expert ones.  Yikes.

Normally, we zone out at the sight of the tiny catalogs thrown into the games boxes, but this company Smart Games USA had a ton of offerings, opening with, "At SmartGames we believe in game-based learning.  By playing our games everyone can unlock their potential while having a good time!"

It turns out they also made the Smart Dog Agility Course game that I posted here about six months back.

And there's a second little booklet included, this time for PlayRoom.SmartGames.com where there are app-based games and combination online/physical games, this time with the motto: "Game Based Learning for Schools or at Home."

OMG -- the first one I looked at was Dream Kitten, where you jump the cat and when it lands, other animals move one step away, which is the game dynamic of Boop in a series of pre-designed puzzle maps.

In Playroom Builder, you "create and share your own smartgames challenges."

This is probably the best set of little game booklet teasers I've ever seen.  Now we want to try some of these things, too.  Meow.  ;-)

Here we are setting up puzzle #4: first the cats, then the pieces, then we solved it.  Fun stuff.


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