A Cat Between Us

After getting completely bogged down by Dog Lover yesterday, we really needed a game where the cards aren't covered in rules and buffs and debuffs.  On some Facebook post yesterday, someone asked about whether some cat game (Calico?) was good or not, and one of the responses was to try A Cat Among Us as it was super quick and awesome.  Something like that.  Thing is, we bought A Cat Among Us a few months back, and when I read through the rules at the time, it seemed disappointingly complex like every other modern game we try.

Then we watched Rodney at Watch It Played.  He described it so well, we could almost throw out the rules and just enjoy the game.  Look!  Each card just has a number.  No extra rules or exceptions or special powers in little tiny fonts.  A cat worth 2 points is a cat worth 2 points.  And it is beautifully simple while being just different enough that we had some figuring out to do.  All the little text in the rulebook was just explaining a few details.

The basic game involves laying out the room, made of four cards with a number track from 0 to 35.  Put the player cat tokens on the track and on the shelf in room one.  Then put the six toy cards below that.  Deal the right number of cards to each player (there's a little chart for that) and pick a card to show where to put the cat token on the number track.

That's all the setup.  Each turn, you play one of your cards under one of the toy cards, essentially assigning point values to that suit of cards.  Each toy (suit) has a max of two value cards that can be played under it, so by the time you cash in your remaining cards, each card is worth between 0 and 12 based on the cards that were played under each suit.  It felt a little like Botswana, where you can wreck the value of the meerkats if another player appears to be collecting them, while boosting elephants and grabbing them on the last turn.

At the end of each short turn, the player closest to the cat marker without going over wins the round, or if both players overshoot, the one who overshot the least is the winner.

You get an extra card or two based on how many times you won ... which makes it more likely that you will overshoot the cat marker next time.  Clever.

3 times 6 = 18 plus a yellow for 10 = 28. Nailed it!

After getting the feel for it, I was able to exactly nail the value two turns in a row.  I approached it by deciding which cats to keep early on, then trying to rig the board with the playable cards to hit my target number.  The first player to win three rounds wins the game, or the game ends when the turn track gets to turn 7.

This was a delight.  It flows so well, and your cats move across the room, scoring wins.  There were no secret rules, no cards that full of test that had to be read over and over again.  No extra rules that got hidden beneath other cards, no clutter that expanded to take over the whole table.  Just one compact space where you tweak the values of the last few cards in your hand.

Anne noted that the two shades of red were too similar, but they also show the toy as a suit on each card.

Thanks, Rodney.  I was worried that this was a much denser game than it turned out to be.  It sat on our shelf for a few months, and did not disappoint.