Everyone knows about man’s best friend and while we are all dog lovers, sometimes cats get the short end of the stick. We felt today that they deserved a bit of loving too and so we have searched far and wide for the best cat board games out there. If you are a fan of felines we can cat-egorically confirm you are going to enjoy this.
Table of Contents
- Calico: The Colour Matching Board Game
- Cat Lady: Most Cats Win
- Cat Café: Build Your Cats a Nice Home
- Simon’s Cat Card Game: Don’t Make A Mess!
- Isle of Cats: AKA Paradise
- Cat-aloguing Our Thoughts on Cat Board Games
Calico: The Colour Matching Board Game
Calico is a board game which encapsulates what all cat owners want to see. Their favourite pet curled up and looking cozy. The game is reminiscent of Patchwork. Each player is trying to be the master quilter.
Gameplay is super simple to learn and teach to new players. Players are looking to match colours to sew buttons (tiles) into the quilt. This will make patterns to attract our furry friends. Scoring tiles are also scattered around the board that give 2 separate bonuses for certain numbers of matching buttons, if you are lucky you can pick up both bonuses at once.
As is typical with pattern based games, they play slightly differently every time. It depends what tile you have in your hand at any given time and then deciding where to place it for the best effect. Last, but not least, the designers have done a phenomenal job with the art style. Beginning as a Kickstarter, Calico is certainly a labour of love from the team behind it.
Cat Lady: Most Cats Win
Cats, cats and more cats. Some people just can’t get enough. For me, I think two is perfect, but everyone has the freedom to have as many as they want and that is the point in this game. It works in a three by three grid of cards. A player may choose to pick a whole row or whole column of cards and then refresh the grid with cards from the deck. The player will then place the cat token onto the row or column they last drew from; the next player cannot draw from that same row (marked by the cat token).
The cards are all related to each other in some way:
- Food: Milk, tuna, or chicken gives you a food cube.
- Cats: These cards act as victory points at the end of the game and need to be fed by a certain number of food cubes.
- Toys: Work a bit like train stations in monopoly, the more sets, the more victory points you get.
- Outfits: The player with the most outfits gets 6 additional points. If a player has no outfits they lose 2 victory points.
- Catnip: Acts as a multiplier to fed cats. Depending on how many catnip cards you have, you can get huge multiplicative bonuses.
- Spray Bottle: move the cat token.
Cats are picky, they only like certain types of food. If a cat is unfed at the end of the game its 2 victory points per cat.
It is a really interesting game with a fun art style. It plays quickly and overall is pretty fun.
Cat Café: Build Your Cats a Nice Home
Cat Café is the re-imagining of a Korean game named Cat Tower and solves a few of its predecessor’s weaknesses. The aim of the game is to attract as many Cats to your café as possible. You do this by completing cat towers. Amusingly, the player who most recently stroked a cat gets to go first!
The game drawing based, so hopefully you have been practicing. Players roll a set of dice (the number of dice is number of players, plus one dice). In turn, each player picks a dice from the table until one remains called the central die.
You may choose to draw an item into the cat tower or pass your turn. Deciding where to draw and drawing the item is dictated by two factors: First, the dice you picked from the table; and second, the central dice. You can choose which way round you want to choose the numbers. i.e. if your dice were 5 & 3, you could choose the 3rd or 5th tower and draw the 3rd or 5th item. However, you can’t draw/place 3, 3 or 5, 5.
Simon’s Cat Card Game: Don’t Make A Mess!
We picked this game because we were really curious to know who both Simon his cat were. The game is super straightforward and aimed at a younger audience – so great for families.
The game is all about matching colours and numbers in a similar style to Uno. However, we are not trying to get rid of all our cards, it is more a game about surviving. If you cannot play a card, you have to take the pile, called the mess, and place it in front of you. At the end of the round, the player with the most mess takes a Simon card. The game ends when a player has three Simon cards, they lose, everyone else wins.
A clever addition to the game is not all suits have the same number of cards. The red cat suit, for example, has cards three though twelve and is the most common suite; gnomes on the other hand only have a one and a two. There are six suits all with different ranges. It is all about playing into cards and suits you do not think your opponents have, forcing them to pick up the mess.
Isle of Cats: AKA Paradise
This tetris-esque game sees you trying to save as many cats as possible on the Isle of cats before the evil Lord Vesh appears. It is a classic most points wins scenario, so let’s see what we are getting into.
Each play has a board in the shape of a boat your aim is to fit the most cats you can on board. Every empty square on the boat is -5 points. Cats can only be placed next to adjacent cats. If you have three or more of the same colour – called a family – you get victory points. Points increase depending on how many cats are connected, for example, for a family of 3=8 points, a family of 10=40 points.
Players pick cats from the island in turns, so it is best to keep an eye out for what cat your opponent is looking for next to compete a family.
Cat-aloguing Our Thoughts on Cat Board Games
Cat board games are a bit of a rarity. It seems that even though cat-lovers exist in the board game world, they are not yet making enough noise for publishers to hear. The success of games like Calico and Isle of Cats does seem to be turning that around. There are a few cat-themed board game projects in the works over at Kickstarter – where many board games are born these days. It will be interesting to see what will be published in the next few years. Hopefully there will not be any cat-astrophes.
