The Isle of Cats Reviews

5 Rating 18 Reviews

The Isle of CatsThe City of Games are a UK publisher with a varied output. From The City of Kings, to Valoran Gardens and now The Isle of Cats. The Isle of Cats is a game about filling a boat with cats. The cats come in various Tetrisy shapes and different colours. You will have to keep families (colours) of cats together, while also maximising your scoring.As well as placing your cat tiles on your ship you will be drafting cards and these cards will dictate your game strategy. You will draft lesson cards that give you points for achieving different objectives, baskets for holding any cats you manage to rescue, treasures to capture, and hopefully ways to befriend high scoring Oshax felines.Filling your boat is also important, as any rooms you haven’t filled and rats you haven’t covered will lose you points at the end. As well as baskets to catch cats you are going to need to tempt them with food - in this case fish. At the start of every day (round) you will be given 20 fish from the supply, and will then draft cards until you have 7 each. From this selection you will choose which cards you want to keep and pay the cost in fish. Don’t go overboard though as you will need to save some for luring cats too. Lesson cards are either public or private and offer up more point scoring opportunities. Green cards help you catch cats by giving you a speed value (highest speed gets first pick of the cats) and baskets to use. Cats are in one of two fields and each have a cost associated with it which must be paid in fish. Isle of Cats is a great choice for gamers and families with it’s easy to simplify rules and also includes a ruleset for solo gamers. Player count: 1-4Time: 60-90 minutesAge rating: 8+

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“Isle of Cats is a great game with much more depth than you would think at first glance. Pull cats from the bag (and occasionally gold), get fish, draft cards, buy cards with fish, bribe the cats with fish and a basket finally place cats on your boat. The depth comes from balancing your fish supply between buying cards, bribing cats and keeping enough for the next round. Its a fine line to toe but one that never makes you feel like you cannot do anything as you need to save fish for the next round. Also placing the cats is not as simple as it sounds, getting points for having families of cats touching (the same colour), but then loosing points at the end of the game for not covering rats or not filling rooms, it is a very good puzzle and one that will change from game to game with the help of drawing cats from the bag, so you never know what is coming up and if your strategy will pan out. There are many ways to score points and not just from putting cats on your boat. Within the deck of cards are lessons that you will work towards for the end of the game, from having a colour of cat touching the edges of the boat, to getting points for simply having the lessons in front of you, even if you cannot complete them. While playing this we didn't come across any negatives, but the luck element along with the threat of analysis paralysis while placing your cats, could put some people off. The shear amount of variation along with a great gameplay loop will have you coming back for more again and again.”

4 Helpful Report

Posted 4 years ago

“A fantastic board game . Easy to learn. You never know we is going the winning player. Playing solo modus is very pleasant and a perfect modus to understand in depth all “ the lessons”. ( We have the Kickstarter) .”

Helpful Report

Posted 5 years ago