Matthew BaileyToday’s review, game 9 in our “Reviews Leading Up to (and now in) the February Half Term and past Valentine’s Day” series, is “Card Catcher” played with Jack(.8.) and Toby(5) and Henry(2).
“Card Catcher” is a fun, simple dexterity game that is part of “Level 99 Games’s” new Family Games series. Before Christmas, we reviewed “Cool Animal Facts”, which we thoroughly enjoyed as well as Bullet♥︎. The latest from them is “Card Catcher”.
The game is themed around a grabber machine in a video arcade, collecting plush toys from a machine. Some of the toys have ticket values, and others provide abilities that let you adjust or manipulate your score.
You start the game by laying all of the cards out on the table, some face up and some face down. To do this in the most random way possible, I gave these to Henry(2), who I love dearly but, compared to the other two, is, to use the “technical” term, bonkers. He proceeded to throw them all up in the air and spread them all over the table, thoroughly enjoying doing it.
The object of the game then is to drop the coin from a distance so that it lands on the card you want to pick up. Now, this is a fairly easy thing to do and to make it more difficult, you have to hold one of your elbows on the table and the other elbow on top of your hand in order to make a crane-like motion. This makes dropping the coin accurately a lot more difficult because you kind of have to spatially work out where it’s going to go. Being a lifelong player of video games as well as a design technologist, I found this fairly easy and could comfortably predict where my coin was going to drop most of the time, but the boys found this quite difficult, and with Henry, we just let him drop the coin as he wanted. If you land on a face-down card, you may keep the card but do not have to show its contents to the other players.
There was a small strategy that Jack and I got the hang of where on some occasions we didn’t want to take a card because we could just about see that there was a much stronger card underneath that we didn’t want to reveal and let another player get.
The rules of the game state that the card it hits first is the one that you pick up, but we also played a house rule there of the game where we took the coin that it landed on. In the end, this equally ended up being a fun variation.
Play continues until a player takes their sixth card, at which point each player gets one more turn and the game ends. The fact that you are limited to six cards means that you do need to take stock of what you are taking, and the decision of what card you’re going to take becomes quite crucial.
We had good fun with this, and it was quite different from a lot of games we usually play. It reminded me a little bit of “Dino World,” a game we reviewed nearly two and a half years ago, and also Pogs from the 90s… Off I go down an eBay rabbit hole to get a hold of some POGs.
Is this game something that you should rush out to buy? Not 100%, but it’s good fun, and it definitely has a place in my collection, and the kids really enjoyed playing it because it was relatively unusual, and the components are of high quality. You probably have a decent idea if this will appeal to your little ones.
If this game gets a second printing there are a few easy additions I would recommend to Level 99 Games in order to improve the product. First, they add a selection of variations to the package that can easily be played using the same components, such as taking the card the coin ends up on, as mentioned above, or having to flick the coin onto the playing surface. You can even rename it slightly to Card Arcade and add slightly different variants to other arcade games.
Equally, I would have liked to see more abilities on the cards themselves.
From a production point of view, the game is absolutely excellent. The packaging is simple yet extremely effective, and the way that the coin is visible through the box is really nice. The cards themselves are of high-quality plastic, and the coin is really nice as well.
The game states as 8+ on the box (largely due to safety testing, which is why 8+ is such a popular “family game” age), but realistically, this is best suited to younger board gamers, and as such, Toby(5) and Henry(2) specifically loved it.
Currently, the game is brand new and can only be imported from the US with some fairly hefty shipping. Level 99 has stated that they are hoping to have it available in the UK soon.
If you live in NA then it is readily available on Level 99’s website.
Disclaimer: A copy of “Card Catcher” was kindly provided by “Level 99 Games” for the purpose of review. Crystal Tsui of “Level 99 Games” is part of our community, and I consider her a friend. All of our thoughts and opinions are however 100% our own.
