This is one of those games that’s very simple – good for younglings or intense multitaskers. Feed the Kitty involves dice, mice, and a bowl. And that’s it!
Players take turns rolling dice, which will make them put mice in the bowl, take mice from the bowl, or give mice to another player. You only get to roll if you have mice in front of you, and you’re still in even if you don’t – there’s always the chance someone has to pass you some! Unless it’s a two-player game, in which case the end-of-game condition – when all but one player are out – is immediate. Sorry. The player who still has mice is the winner.
There is, of course, a fourth option on the dice: take a cat nap! Perhaps my favorite “no action” gimmick to date.
For my Midwest folks, because I didn’t know about it – Lizzadro Museum is in Oak Brook, Illinois, and dedicated to carved and polished stones and gems. There’s a gorgeous collection of jade pieces, mosaics, and information on both the cultural contexts and the materials themselves.
I don’t think I need to say much about this one, really. It’s not a large museum, and it covers a lot without ever feeling like the displays are crowding each other. If you like art, rocks, or the historical contexts in which either has existed, you’ll find something to enjoy here.
Beyond that, I’ll let the photos speak for themselves!
There are games that are rewardingly difficult, even educational (like Wingspan!), and there are games that are simple and hilarious. Monster Factory is one of the latter.
You’re building monsters. Like Dizios, you’re aligning like sides to like, only in this case it’s much more straightforward: there are purple/wide sides, and green/narrow ones. You draw one tile at a time and play it immediately on any player’s monster, provided it fits. It only gets discarded if there’s nowhere to put it! A completed monster is, of course, one with nowhere for new tiles to go. If all monsters are completed, the game ends; otherwise, the player immediately draws a tile as the base for a minion. When the game ends – which can also be caused by tiles running out – all completed monsters and minions are scored, monsters for total number of tiles and minions for tiles with eyes on them. What you want, then, is to build as large a monster as you can without running out of time.
And that’s it! That’s all the mechanics in one paragraph. Like I said: simple. The important part of this game is how fantastically ridiculous the pieces are, both on their own and compounded. One of our favorites is the green appendage holding a little screaming person! Which really sets the tone, don’t you think?
It’s always a delight when a game can multitask! Wingspan is one of those strategy games with lots of moving parts and several ways to earn points. We’ve played it four times now and I haven’t used the same strategy twice! It’s also an educational deep-dive into the birds of North America.
It’s essential that the core mechanics are simple – everything else is as complicated as you let it be, and as informational as you let it be, but the actual pattern all play follows is pretty straightforward! Each player has little colored cubes and a player board. Each turn, there are four actions available to them. The first is to play a bird in the leftmost open space in one of their three habitats, marking the column with a cube. After the first column, playing birds costs eggs.
The other three actions are specific to those habitats. In each case, your cube starts in the rightmost open space of the habitat, on the habitat’s ability itself, and then moves left, giving you the choice of activating each bird it passes over, provided they have a “When Activated” ability. (Also possible are “When Played” and “Once Between Turns.”) The habitats themselves are the forest, which lets you gain food – necessary to play most birds – from the birdfeeder; the grasslands, which let your birds lay eggs; and the wetlands, which let you draw more bird cards. A round is over when all cubes have been placed, and one is then used to mark end-of-round scoring. The result is that your number of actions each round goes down as the number of things each action does goes up. The game has four rounds. Scoring is a tally of the point values of your birds themselves, end-of-round goals, bonus cards (you pick one at the beginning of the game and can draw more later), eggs, food on cards (bird ability), and tucked cards (also a bird ability). Like I said – many ways to earn points!
And then, of course, there’s the technical aspects. The educational aspects. The part I’m nerding out over the most. Including the swift-start, the cards cover 180 North American bird species, including: their common names, Latin names, their habitats, what they eat, the continents they live on, nest type, wingspan, and how many eggs they lay in a year – that last one was brought down to scale. Some of these are just neat – continents, Latin names – and some are mechanically relevant! Various cards and end-of-round goals are dependent on nest type, or number of eggs in a particular nest type. (There’s a wild type that counts as everything, and in reality they have non-standard nesting habits. Like black terns, which apparently nest on water.) How many eggs the species naturally lays determines the limit for how many they can have in the game. Wingspan is relevant specifically when certain predatory birds are preying on the top card of the deck – if it’s below a certain wingspan, it’s edible. There is so much love and care and research permeating every inch of this game; it’s palpable and contagious. I expect the same is true of the expansions, too, which feature other continents! Someday…
