The Cat Distribution System (Jessika Rocha)

The is a cute one-page jam game I found on itch.io.  It can be printed on a single sheet of paper and folded into a little 8-page booklet that would fit into a regular deck of cards.  I have seen a few of these now, and they are both cute and clever.  The creator's playthrough video is here.

Meow.  We sat down and played it on Saturday, ironically just a few hours after taking my cat Mango to the vet.

Since all the rules had to fit on one sheet of paper, it wouldn't be expected to be hugely elaborate.  Instead, these games give such clever basic frameworks, you can imagine scenarios and expansions in your mind's eye.  Here, you make a basic character with a name and four d6 stats, and this character is going to wander around town looking for cats to rescue.

Roll dice to pick a few odd items that you can maybe roleplay into the game.  Then roll 2d6 to see which part of town you're visiting and another 2d6 to see what you're doing in that part of town.  Together, this gives a d% chance of finding a cat.

Once you find a cat, there is a set of three skill match-ups provided, and if you win two of them, you can get the cat to come home with you.  These are described as "d6 contests", one player stat vs one cat stat.  What this boils down to is rolling a d6 plus your stat, then rolling a d6 plus the cat stat, and the high roll wins the contest.  Simple enough.

Once you get a cat home, you can roll to choose between 6 activities, and set a "trust meter" at 1 out of 10.  Each "day" you can try two activities (petting, grooming, etc) and roll another d6-vs-d6 contest.  Each success moves the trust meter up one, each failure moves it down one.  If you get the trust meter to 10, you get a friend for life and win the game.

It's simple and works.  Anne even got into the storytelling a bit.  We worked out that she could drop the hat onto a cat to calm it down for a +1 bonus to capturing skill, and use the mirror to make little lights on the ground for the cats to chase at home, for another little bonus.

I ended up drawing this little city map as we went along.  When we found a cat, I put a little circle number next to the place where we found it, then wrote up the cat stats off to the right.  Two of them ran away, and that should have ended the game, but we wanted to tame two of them, so we kept going.  It was light-hearted and fun.

I should have put a little more effort into adding some doodles to my playthrough, and we were having trouble with the printer.  There is a color version that has a +1 feel.

We already started making our own house rules.  It didn't make sense that your mode of transport gives a modifier to your Patience stat.  You're not in the vehicle when looking for the cat, you should be out looking under boxes and stairs.  It made more sense to me that your vehicle would say how many spaces you can explore in a day.  But the game had no days.  You could give it a day marker and have challenges to tame a cat within 10 days.  So, walking could let you hit 2 spaces per day, train 4 and car or motorcycle could give 5.  But with no expenses to balance them, everyone would just pick the fastest one.  So the Patience bonus does make sense ... if moving slower gives you time to look more carefully.

The activities at home also felt too quick.  Throwing the same PAT vs SKI roll over 10 times in a row was awkward, especially if you have a PAT below 3 and could only tame the least scared cat in the world. There is more chance for fun here.  Give different stats for each activity.  But then you would only pick the activity where you have the best chances, so maybe there is some rotation needed.  Taking a cat to the vet doesn't feel like a trust-building activity.  And starting the trust meter at 1 sucks a bit, since if your first try is a failure, the cat runs off right away.  We found that starting it at 3 works better.

Now, if you want to simulate the full Cat Distribution System, I immediately felt that this game needed an expansion where you can add an adoption center.  Find homes for those kitties.  After all, you can't keep them all ...

You could roll up three characters as the employees.  Then you could assign one of them to searching the city and let the other two do the at-home trust work.  Rotate the staff for variety, so you don't have the same bad stat holding you up all the time.  Then, once you get three cats "tamed" you can open the center to adoptions.  Then you roll d3 visitors showing interest each day, give them maybe 2 basic stats (EMPathy and TRUstworthiness feel like the right stats from my own experience helping with kitten adoption events).  If the customer passes their rolls, they need two rolls to see if the cat accepts them, and if so, that's an adoption.

Can you get 5 cats adopted in 30 days from the start?  We wouldn't need to go into details of hiring staff or posting advertisements, just these two new layers of activity to explore.

This game is a win.  More important than all the graphics poured into big productions, this has a good heart.  It's good to feel human again.

Mango says to play again.

I am drafting up some Adoption Center rules to playtest this weekend.