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!
Cowabunga is a saying, yes, and also a cattle-themed surfing card game. The goal is simple – to wipe out the least!
The execution is more difficult, and requires a combination of luck, memory, and mental math. The whole game revolves, unsurprisingly, around a wave, the height of which is altered by player actions. Each turn, you’ll play a Wave Card, adding to the wave height when the wave is rising, and subtracting when it falls. But be careful! There are also Obstacle Cards, numbered ten through thirty, and if the sum (or difference) of your play equals an opponent’s Obstacle, you wipe out! You’re not out of a game, but you do have to take a Cow Pawn.
That said, you do have one advantage – you get to see the Obstacle Cards when your opponents first draw them. You then have to remember which numbers they are, and hope your Wave Cards grant you the option of avoiding them. This is further complicated as the game goes on, because whenever someone takes the wave to higher than thirty, or lower than ten, not only does the direction flip, but the player to their right draws another Obstacle. In other words, if you’re the one to cross that threshold, the surf just got more hazardous for you.
Especially in a two-player game, you can reach a truly impressive number of Obstacles to remember. I think I had to avoid twelve numbers, the last time we played. Regardless of the number of players, the game ends when someone reaches four Cow Pawns or the last Obstacle Card is drawn. And as I said earlier, the player who wiped out the least wins!
We first played Flyin’ Goblin back in January, the day it was gifted to Mom, and we’ve played it many times since. This is mainly because there are catapults involved.
Yes, you heard that right. Catapults! The “Flyin'” part of Flyin’ Goblin is quite literal; gameplay involves launching your Goblin meeples into the castle so they can pillage the Rooms they land in. Coins are used to recruit more to the cause, be they more soldiers to fling, the Captain, to fling with doubled effects, or Robbers, who chill on Roofs and burgle a Diamond a turn. Diamonds are one of the victory conditions; your other option is to build all tiers of the Totem without your opponents knocking it down. (The Totem also sits on a rooftop, and costs Coins to build.)
The actual catapulting is a mix of accuracy and speed – you want to land in specific Rooms, certainly, but you also want to launch all your Goblins! Everyone starts this step at the same time, and continue at their own pace until all but one player have called out “Finished!” The last player then gets one more launch.
Alongside resource Rooms, there are a couple that have penalties, and several that simply have effects. Whether they’re good or bad depends entirely on what you were looking for! They are not, however, optional. If you land in the Pantry and you have two Coins, you must trade them for two Diamonds.
The “honeypot” of the arrangement is the King’s Bedchambers, which give you three Diamonds for landing there. If you gained the Balcony by knocking the King off it (not visible in my pictures, as the King has already been displaced and given his consolation prize of a lower Roof; at the beginning of the game, the Balcony balances over the top of his Bedchambers) you get five instead! Knocking the King down from his lower Roof will also gain you the Balcony, later in the game, but now you’re just bullying the poor guy.
If you’re not familiar with the serotonin rush of flinging little game pieces at the board for points, I highly recommend it. Good for the soul. Try not to hit the other players, though!
Scarf-N-Barf is a vomit-humored game from Steve Jackson Games, and both very simple and very quick. It’s exactly what it says on the tin; you’re going to (in card game manner, thankfully) eat lots of junk food, then go on crazy rides and try not to hurl.
For breakfast, lunch, and dinner each – you’ve spent all day doing this, vomit not deterring you – you’ll pick three of the six cards you’ve been dealt, representing the food you eat. Some of these sound really good: Cheese Curds! Some do not, like the Chowder Pop. All foods have a color-number combo associated with them; the more points its worth, the more of these criteria they have. After everyone has picked their meals, three Rides are dealt (with names like “Tilt-A-Hurl” and “Hork-A-Tron”) which all players will suffer together. One Ride at a time, the corresponding color dice will be rolled, and any food items that match both the color of the die and the number rolled are lost; you throw up straight into the discard. Any foods that survive all three Rides are successfully digested. At the end of the day, the player who’s retained the highest point value wins!
This is one of those games that’s about luck in a variety of ways. The cards you’re given. The dice indicated by the Ride cards. The way you actually roll. Doubles on your cards are a pain; doubles on your dice are a gift. There are several ways to strategize and none of them are guaranteed to work. The chaos is palpable. And your actual stomach’s contents are safe, unless the concept (or the cards) makes you queasy.
That’s right! The cat, the myth, the legend: Purrrlock Holmes! Purrrlock Holmes: Furriarty’s Trail is, you’ll surely have deduced, a deductive reasoning game. The goal is to work together to catch Furriarty before he can escape London, while simultaneously competing to be the best Inspector!
It comes down to a lot of smaller cases, like pulling threads. Each player has an Investigation, stood facing away from them so only their opponents can see. This card, like all the rest, features one of five characters, and one of twelve times. The goal is to guess one or both correctly. Not without evidence, of course! Each turn, you’ll Investigate two cards from your hand, revealing them to the other players, who will tell you if each is a Lead or Dead End. A Lead is a card that has the same Suspect, same Hour, or an adjacent Hour to your Investigation. You also draw and Investigate two cards when you draw a new Investigation, so you always have something to work with!
You may guess once per turn; if you’re right, you take tokens from Furriarty’s trail equal to the aspects you deduced and place them on the Investigation, discarding the Leads and Dead Ends. Note that if you guess both, you must get both right; otherwise, you’re incorrect, and your opponents are disallowed to tell you why. If you guess incorrectly, the Investigation stays open, and you draw no cards this turn. Usually, you end your turn by passing your two remaining cards, then drawing two new ones; instead, you’ll have no choice but to Investigate the cards you’re given next turn. This isn’t always the worst thing – I’ve found that if you’re down to two times and you know the suspect, or vice versa, it’s often worth taking the guess and, if necessary, taking next turn’s guess before you Investigate.
The goal, ultimately, is to catch Furriarty, who functions like a token and moves one spot forward each time everyone’s had a turn, revealing the token he passed. Furriarty is worth three points, while the other tokens range from one to three. Once closing an Investigation snags him, the game is over, and whoever has the most points is Scotland Pound Chief Inspector! If Furriarty reaches the end of the trail, though, and one last round isn’t enough to catch up, Furriarty escapes, everyone loses, and the player with the least points is… Litter Box Inspector. *shudder*
The timing is well-balanced, so it tends to be pretty close. You can call on Holmes for help, once per game, to take an extra guess and a one point penalty. Absolutely worth it, to not get stuck on box duty. And to catch that crook!
Meeple Party is, in fact, a game in which Meeple throw a party. Who knew? Better yet, it’s cooperative, so you’re all throwing a party together! As parties generally should be.
There are, by default, five Roommates throwing the party. Players each pick one to play and the rest are NPCs. All players can move all Roommates, just like they can move all guests, but certain Surprises will give or take Stress from specific Roommates, which is the only time your specific character matters. The backs of the character tiles double as rooms – those rooms specifically are optional, but there are a certain set required in the house, namely a Kitchen, Living Room, Dining Room, Bathroom, Bedroom, Door, and Outside. Rooms are arranged however the players want.
Each Roommate’s turn starts by welcoming a new Meeple to the party. This means drawing one out of a bag, and then placing them in a room of your choice and activating their effect – each color of Meeple is a different personality type, with can draw Meeple toward them or push them away. The exception is the white Meeple, which cause a Surprise and then disappear back into the bag, to cause more later! In the photo below, we drew The Conga Line as our Surprise – it moves all Meeple in the room with the most to the room with the least, which is how we wound up with five in the Bathroom. You then move a Meeple of your choice to an adjacent room and activate their effect. The goal is meet your Photo criteria!
We’ll get to Photos, but first – Disasters. The difficulty level you chose at the beginning of the game will determine whether you get individual or communal Disasters, or both! Disasters list criteria you must not meet, lest you gain Stress. If all players get three Stress, the party ends prematurely because you blew up and kicked everyone out. If you have individual Disasters, they only trigger on your turn.
After that, you get to check for Photo opportunities! Everyone has two Photos in hand that they’re trying to take, with either a minimum or exact requirement. Sometimes these clash painfully with Disasters, like when I needed exactly one Flirt and one Jerk in a Bathroom, and also couldn’t have Jerks and Flirts in the same room without incurring Stress.
The good news is, 3, 6, 9, and 12 o’clock on the Clock refresh Disasters! The Clock activates after you check for Photos, and after you move it up one space per Photo you completed this turn. There are a few different effects, some more inconvenient than others. (*cough* laying down Meeple *cough*) (Laying down Meeple can’t be moved until you’ve taken a turn to stand them back up. They’re napping, sick, etc.) You then replace any Photos or Disasters you triggered this turn.
The length of the party is also determined at the beginning of the game; in the (out-of-game) photos, we were playing Casual, or a 12-Photo goal. The objective is to reach the end of the party without completely stressing out!
This one has a colorful and entertaining realism (which is not a word I thought I’d assign to Meeple) and the mix of cards, chosen room arrangements, chosen difficulties (in multiple ways), and optional items and pets (each with their own mechanics) all combine to give Meeple Party a whole lot of replay value! We haven’t played the alternate game modes yet, but I look forward to trying the Hot Tub Party, where you aim to get as many Meeple into the Hot Tub before stressing out.
There’s a kids game with exactly that premise: Penguin! Yep, just Penguin. And it’s easy to learn, as evidenced by the single double-sided sheet of rules.
The even shorter version? Players blindly draw penguins and hide them behind their screen, so only they can see. Everyone takes turns placing a single penguin in play, either next to one that’s already there, or balanced between two, matching the color of at least one of them. Usually the bottom row has a max of eight penguins, but we were playing two-player, so it was seven. A player is out when they can’t play another figure. The round is over when everyone is out.
Now, you’ve heard of highest score, you’ve heard of lowest score, but get ready for: least negative score! That’s right, players score penalties for each penguin they couldn’t place. They also incur a hefty penalty if they knock over the iceberg, but since we were making full use of the wings (slots for the base of penguins above, holding them steady) we didn’t exactly have that problem.
Play until you’ve had as many rounds as you have players, and then award whomever has the least penalties “Monarch of Penguin Stacking”! (That’s not an official part of the game, but you could.)
This one’s really simple, so it may be under-stimulating for an all-adult group, but I imagine it’s good for little ones, and especially for encouraging them to be gentle with piece placement. That, and there is a little strategy in the form of cutting off different color paths, or trying not to.
Arboretum is a gorgeous tree-based strategy game that I tried at a friend’s house this week… and completely forgot to take pictures of. Whoops. The basis of the game is that you’re building an arboretum and, eventually, scoring your trees. Or rather… some of them.
Each player starts with seven cards in hand, which will be a constant. On your turn, you’ll draw two cards, play one, and discard another. Each player has their own face-up discard pile, which is important because cards can be drawn from the top of the deck, but also the top of any discard!
Except for your first card, everything played has to be orthogonally adjacent to a tree already in your arboretum. Everyone has their own, so your played cards don’t directly affect each other, but may affect what cards you choose to pick up. More on that later. The goal, ultimately, is to make paths. A path is any set of trees of ascending value that start and end with the same species. (So long as you can draw a line between them, it can be as twisty as you want.) The trees in the middle can be something else, and they can skip numbers, but you get a bonus point for paths that start with a 1, and two for paths that end with an 8! You also get extra points if your path is at least 4 trees long and all the same species.
Your strategy, then, may be informed by what other players are playing, to block advantageous moves. However. There’s another element to scoring. Only one player has the right to score each species! Who is determined by the cards in your hand when the deck runs out. Whoever has the highest sum value of that species in their hand gets to score it – ties are friendly, and if nobody has it then everyone can score. This means you might pick up other players’ favored trees, to prevent them from scoring, but you also need enough of your best types in hand to actually reap the benefits of your work.
Between the spatial logic, planning ahead, ever-shifting discard selection, and scoring intricacies, Arboretum is a deceptively challenging mental exercise hidden behind calming, beautiful art.
Heartcatchers is a quick to play, two-player bluffing game, in which hearts catch other hearts and collect Secrets. It’s also extremely quick to learn!
The game starts with six face-up heart cards in two rows of three, three cards in each player’s hand, and the rest set aside as a draw pile. On a player’s turn, they may “catch” a stack in front on them – red hearts catch green, green hearts catch blue, and blue hearts catch red – by playing the correct color of heart face-up on top of it, catch an opponent’s stack and swap it for any one of their own, or play a card as a Secret, face-down at the bottom of a stack and perpendicular to those that are face-up. There are also two Uncatchable cards, which can catch any color but cannot be caught! Players draw after playing.
The game continues until all cards have been played, which doesn’t take long, seeing as there are only twenty. Then, scoring! Any face-up cards in a player’s stack are worth one point. Some cards, when played as Secrets, may add or subtract points, or swap the stack with the one directly across from it. We’ve played this game twice so far, and both times we hit a “reverse, reverse!” situation where a stack had two Change-of-Heart cards under it.
And… that’s it! Whoever has the most points wins, and if there’s a tie then the game’s so short you just play it again. Alongside being quick, pretty (look at those sparkles), and simple yet tricky, it’s also a compact game, so it’s easy to find room on your shelves for! Ours are pretty packed, so “this game is small” is a major bonus.
Surprise! I’m not done with Hearthstone yet. If you haven’t read my first two posts on it, you can find those here and here. All caught up? Great! The third play style is Tavern Brawl, which has a new set of rules each week. For instance, “[y]our deck is full of wannabes who cast a random spell at a random target when played.” Some rules, like this one, provide you with a deck, while other times you’ll have to build your own. Depends on the week!
The fourth option on the main menu is “Modes,” which leads you to… four other options. Arena and Duels are both a three-strikes system in which you build a deck and try to win as many games as you can before you’re out; each can be played using Gold or Tavern Tickets, and each wins you more prizes the longer you last. Duels also has a Casual mode, which costs nothing but has no reward. As for the mechanics, Arena features the traditional characters and rules, while Duels has its own characters, with extra abilities and increasing Health and deck size the further in you get. I personally prefer Duels, both because it has that Casual option and because it’s my kind of chaotic. I especially like how the addition of new cards each turn forces my strategy to grow and adapt; it’s ever-changing, which means it’s never boring!
Solo Adventures are Hearthstone’s story mode, where you can play through the characters’ origin stories and learn more about their history with each other. Functionally, it’s a lot like traditional Hearthstone, but against an NPC and with dialogue. Some arcs have you rooting for yourself more than others; March of the Lich King was painful because I didn’t want Arthas to win, knowing full well the villain he was becoming. Others are clearly the hero of the story, regardless of whether they’re in the Book of Heroes. (Rokara is in the Book of Mercenaries. She’s also the most consistently heroic character I’ve played so far.)
The final game mode is Mercenaries, which is by far the most unique. Whereas the others are about picking the right cards, success in Mercenaries is more about what you do with the cards you’ve picked. It works like this: to take on a Bounty, you put together a party of six Mercenaries. Protectors deal double damage to Fighters, who deal double to Casters, who deal double to Protectors, so you might base who you bring on which type your opponent is. However, your opponent is the last in a whole lineup of NPCs you’ll have to fight to reach them, so the ideal party has a little bit of everything. Pick wisely, because once you start the Bounty, you’re locked into those six cards. Success is instead contingent on picking, 1) the right three to have in play for any given combat, and 2) the right abilities from each of them to maximize effect. Each ability has a speed, with the lower numbers going first, and you can see what your opponents have picked before choosing moves yourself. Be exceedingly careful with the Health of your characters, though, because if a Mercenary dies, they’re out for the rest of the Bounty! And if everybody dies, big surprise, you’ve lost. There are a few major perks to this game mode, too. First is that, like in Duels, you’ll get a new upgrade after each fight, which lasts for the duration of the Bounty. The second is that, unlike Duels – or any other Hearthstone mode – each combat grants your Mercenaries XP, which unlocks new permanent abilities! You’ll also receive Merc-specific Coins, which can be used to upgrade those abilities.
The closest that traditional Hearthstone gets to this is the Reward Track – by playing games and completing daily or weekly quests, you progress along a track that earns you Gold, cards, Tavern Tickets, and Card Packs, which can be opened for five cards apiece. Battlegrounds also has its own track, where you can earn Hero skins and emotes.
And that’s Hearthstone! I definitely didn’t cover everything, but we’d be here for a very long time if I did. Hearthstone is near and dear to me, so I hope I’ve managed to impart at least the impression of everything, in case any piece of it interests you, too. See you in the Tavern!
