Boop Shuffle

This is a card game version of Boop, which we reviewed here.

We had vague recollections that the original Boop was cute but confusing.  It was hard to visualize the moves when each cat or kitten played booped the tiles around it.

Boop Shuffle perfectly catches that same confusing feel in a tiny deck of cards.  It is still for two players only.  There are two little rolled up strips that you can put down at right angles to represent the edges of a 6x6 game board.  The original Boop was much better in this respect, with the cute "turn the box into a bed" motif.





Here, you still try to get three kittens/cats in a row to promote the kittens to cats, thought it's done in an obtuse way by putting the promoted cats into the discard pile.  So they will be available the next time the discard pile is shuffled into a new draw pile.  It was a bit disappointing just drawing a card and playing it, even if it's the other player's cat.

There are a few variant cats, and one single Blanket card that can be played on top of the card of your choice to protect it from one boop.

Just like in the original Boop, our two wins were a surprise.  Neither of us actually planned those outcomes.  I had to point them out when I was getting ready to play another card.  Oh, the game is over, huh.

This just felt really odd.  The lack of a proper game board was sad.  I had to keep lining them up with the imaginary lines as they got bumped around.

But, Boop Shuffle will stay on our shelf, right in front of Boop.  Both win on the cuteness scale.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Idle Planet Miner: Selling Your Galaxy

Image
Back in Idle Planet Miner, production was starting to bog down, with crafts taking an hour apiece, and sometimes needing hundreds of items to unlock new research.  So, I figured it would be a good time to test out their "Sell Your Planet" feature, which has so many people online asking questions. These idle games can't level up through an infinite many items, so they all have this same kind of game reset mechanism.  In Idle Planet Miner, the Sell Galaxy button shows you the value of your galaxy and how many credits you will get for it.  These credits are a kind of meta currency, letting you buy new rooms for your ships, with each new room offering a different game boost.  Clicking the Sell button will show you exactly what you will lose: all planets, cash, ores, alloys, items, research.  Which sounds terrible.  But you get to keep your dark matter, your managers, your beacon buffs (though you will have to research the Beacon again to get it back on screen),...
Read more

Cat-astrophe

Image
We were looking forward to getting Catastrophe -- we were watching old videos of Lil' Bub, even the documentary Lil' Bub & Friends, and then got a ping from Lil' Bub's human about this new game with a tribute to Lil' Bub.  Had to have one.   The box opening was fine.  There's a gorgeous full-sized full-color booklet about famous video cats, including a whole page about Bub.  The cards had those famous cats, and other characters.  A lovely production.  They clearly loved these cats. But then, the gameplay was essentially about sending cats to their doom.  Spending their nine lives, and trying to avoid the Grim Reapurr, to be exact.  That would have been okay, pushing other cats down the tower so you can be the last cat standing.  But the action cards were almost entirely: gain/lose/steal a life unless you roll 3-6 or 4-6 or 5-6.  Sure, you can spend your yarn balls to reroll dice, which was cute, but it's hard to get more. ...
Read more

WarZone Idle

Image
Playing with WarZone a bit this week, I discovered that there is an "Idle" campaign at the bottom of the main page.  Either that's new, or I just didn't see a year ago when I first wrote about this great app. The Idle campaign is set up in a very interesting way.  The maps appear to be the same sequence as in the main game: you start with the standard Risk world map.  But now, you have a certain amount of money and armies shown at the top right as W and A values.  You gain some amount of each per second, and each space has an army value shown on it.  So maybe Brazil starts at 96.  Click it when you have 96 armies and it's your without a fight. Some spaces have "resources", which include Army Bases (where you can buy armies for W's), Caches (some amount of Ws and As), Mines, Forges and Crafters.  Some of these can be upgraded by spending Ws to get more per second.  You can forge ores into ingots like so many other games and sell all the resources f...
Read more