“Why do you take so many cat photos?” I asked myself once.
“Because they’re doing something cute.”
“But they’re always doing something cute.”
“That’s why I take so many cat photos.”
This, it turns out, is true for more than just cats, which is how I came out of Brookfield Zoo – somewhere I’ve been more times than I can count – with even more animal photos. In my defense… just look at them!
We seem to have had really lucky timing this trip, from start to finish! Happy Pride indeed.
The third and final game in the series! Unlike Cat Days and Woof Days, I can only speculate on the behavioral accuracy of this one. Still, Dino Days features a fun variety of the creatures in question with, like the others, a mix of new and familiar mechanics. (As this is a comparison post, I would highly recommend reading the other posts first! At minimum, the one on Cat Days, where I explained the overall mechanics of the game.)
The most immediately obvious difference is in your starting hand. Like in Cat Days, there’s a fixed card all players start with, and unlike in Cat Days, this card is an animal worth points all on its own. Quite a lot of them, in fact! The catch? Giganotosaurus’s superpower is scaring away all other dinos on the board you’ve played it on, so you need to decide quickly whether you’re using it to garner points or holding it to wield against your opponent.
There are other dinos with similar, though less all-encompassing, predator abilities, and of course some non-dino cards as well. Another major difference with this deck is the Diplodocus: a dino that’s split across Diplodocus Front and Diplodocus Rear cards, which you must have both of to play – spanning two adjacent days of the week, counting as one action, and, if it’s still around at the end of the game, scoring its player twelve points. A tricky set of conditions, sweetened by another factor: many of the dino-removing or -stealing effects can’t touch it. Which in turn makes the Meteor a coveted prize, as one of the few exceptions!
And of course, there are your staples like the Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Ankylosaurus, with much chiller day-of-the-week effects. Triceratops being Sunday-only, for example. True to form, the dinosaur game is one of carnivores and herbivores, functionally distinct from those of Cat Trees and Muddy Paws. Which is what excited me most about this as a set, I think – not only do you pick the flavor text, you get to pick the tone!
I suppose “Dog Days” was disqualified for connotations. That’s alright – I think “Woof Days” is cuter! From the same people who made Cat Days, Woof Days is… well, the dog version. Admittedly, I know far less about dog behavior, so I can only hope it’s as spot-on as the cat game. I’d expect that it is. The contrast between the games is especially interesting! (That’s mostly what I’ll be discussing here, so reading the Cat Days post first would be beneficial.)
Instead of starting with four random cards and a Cat Tree or equivalent, players start this game with five random cards, making your opponent’s opening moves even more unpredictable. Whereas Cat Days cards tend to affect the top card of a pile, many movement effects in Woof Days move the whole stack as a unit, which in retrospect highlighted for me the mix ‘n match behavior of cats and who they choose to hang out with. Some of the animal cards correlate pretty directly – the Rescued Cat and the Mixed Breed have the same effect – while others are distinct. The Chihuahua, for instance, must be played on a day that’s not adjacent to a Great Dane, German Shepherd, or St. Bernard.
Overall, it’s sort of like Fluxx variants: you expect the overall mechanics to be the same, in new flavors. And there’s one more flavor to discuss, so I expect I’ll be posting about that next week!
The advantage to a cat game produced by an animal rescue is that they clearly, viscerally understand cat behavior. In Cat Days, your board is the seven days of the week… and the cats are all picky about where they’re willing to sit.
Some cats are easier to place than others. The Rescued Cat can go on any day, on any board. The Fluffy Cat can only be played on Sunday on any board. More difficultly, the Playful Cat can be played anywhere from Tuesday to Saturday on your own board, but only if both adjacent days are already occupied. All the cats have their quirks, and they’re drawn or played one at a time – be judicious which action you take, because once any player has filled all seven days, the game ends immediately!
At that point, scoring happens, generally counting only the top cat for each day. However, each player starts the game with a Cat Tree, which they can play on a day to let it score up to three! There are other items in the deck too, like the Cardboard Box – play it on your own board to lure an opponent’s cat to it.
As a cat person, I adore this on principle. It’s also simple enough to play while holding a conversation! So long as you keep track of whose turn it is. (We used the box for that.) And it’s part of a series of games, so expect my thoughts on the others soon!
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman is a book about how humans are inherently good and kind.
Too often, I’ve seen this notion brushed aside as naive, and part of what I love about this book is… it isn’t. At all. Bregman doesn’t shy away from humanity’s dark side – quite the contrary! He actively tackles it, presenting everything from the supposed savageness of our prehistoric ancestors, to Lord of the Flies, to the Stanford Prison Experiment, along with the more cynical perspectives on how or why they occurred – before systematically dismantling those arguments with dissenting evidence from other studies. A shocking amount of the former have turned out to be blatantly untrue, whether thanks to misconceptions or deliberately dishonest results. They only continue to circulate because they’ve already been taken as truth! Bregman also addresses events that definitely did happen, and disputes our assumptions about why, or how.
Beyond that, he goes on to offer examples of real-world institutions, be they schools, companies, or governments, that have based practices on the “optimistic” psychology to great success! I put “optimistic” in quotes because as he stresses over the course of the book, this mindset is realism. That is, what science has shown reflects reality. In a nutshell? Our evolutionary superpower is that we’re a social species, and so friendliness is a baked-in survival mechanism. One that we have to choose to honor, and one that we’re predisposed to.
These later sections especially are dear to me, because while it’s heartening to know that people are generally good, that part alone can leave you feeling a bit like my namesake – you know the truth, yes, but who’s listening? Knowing the ways this psychology has been applied – and in the process, revealed – makes the knowledge actionable. And as much as I admire the opposition-first formatting, it’s this part that I appreciate most. Because, to quote Ratatouille, “Change is nature… The part that we can influence.” And we hold the keys to influencing our perception of ourselves.
