Here, Kitty Kitty (at Worldcon)

We went up to the World Science Fiction Convention in Anaheim yesterday, on a last-minute "why not?" mission.  As always, I had terribly anxiety on I-5 driving up there, but we made it from 9 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. before the heat and endless walking wore us out.  We did finally find the gaming room where there was a library of hundreds of games, and maybe 10 people at four tables players having a good time.

As a quiet place to relax, it was perfect.  The first few games we took out turned out to have a minimum of 3 players, so, um, whatever.  Then I brought over "Here, Kitty Kitty!" and it was a winner.  Easy to learn, with friendly art and some good visual gags on the cards.

You start by choosing a house tile with three spaces (Yard, Porch and House), and you dump the 40 plastic cats into the space between the houses, a.k.a. the "Neighborhood".

Each turn, you get two actions out of 1. move a cat one space, 2. play a card, 3. discard up to 3 cards and draw new cards.  The cards with the red frames are instant effect cards and have to be played as soon as they are drawn.  "Moving a cat one space" means moving from Neighborhood to Yard, Yard to Porch, or Porch to House, or the other direction.

The cards were cute and sometimes funny, and covered all the effects that made sense in the limited world of options available.  There were cards that make some of your cats untouchable, move them around, block moves, or bring even more cats inside.  And of course, they can have kittens, too.

So, the main gameplay was fun.  The scoring was just too much, though.  Even with the handy little cards that show the scoring, there's a score pad where you have to count cats about 12 different ways to find out who won.  Most cats of each color, cats of every color, all cats of one color in the House ... meh.  We just had fun tossing cards and moving cats around, joking along the way.  I could not make myself care about strategy at that point in time.

We would play it again if we had a copy.

After that, we looked at CuBirds, and as simple as it looked, we were too tired to figure out exactly what the booklet meant about playing non-matching cards into the grid.  Was the grid supposed to expand and get wider without limit?  We didn't have enough space to sort that one out.  It felt like there were some interesting game mechanics about how the cards are played, but we were getting restless again.  Maybe we will see it again some day.

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