Cat Earth

On this flat earth roam giant cats that accidentally (or deliberately?) push your houses off the edge of the world. Win by being the last one with houses remaining.

On your turn draw a card and then play up to four cards. Most cards either show a movement pattern which you apply to one cat (e.g. forward two squares then left one). You can rotate the cards to a direction that suits but must complete the whole movement without a cat falling off or bumping into a tree or other cat. There are also some special cards that let you teleport a cat to an empty space, swap two houses or return a cat to the centre of the board. Each time the deck of cards runs out, you add another cat to the board.

Components are nice. I like how the inner box slides into the outer box like a drawer. Everything fits in the insert easily. The board is on the bottom of the inner box (similar to Boop), although that means you don’t want to leave any pieces inside it while you’re playing. The cats are cute and all the pieces are nice, wooden things. The landscape on the board is pretty too. Cards seem standard quality to me and are easy to understand.

I played this as a 3 player game with my 7 year old and my mother-in-law. We quickly found that it seemed very slow. You start with two cards each but as you only gain a card per turn we couldn’t really see how you ever play as many as four on a turn without having passed on multiple turns. We might have misunderstood something but Hayley’s interest was dwindling so we housed-ruled that you draw two instead which helped to move things along. I still think it took us much longer than the suggested 30 minutes. But I really like the core gameplay of cats booping houses around based on the cards. It probably would feel faster at 2 player but also more overtly ‘take that’ as you couldn’t spread your attacks between multiple opponents. I also suspect this would be too simple with limited replayability for kids that already play more complex games but it was about the right difficulty for Hayley.