Cat Between Us

• Designer: Sky Huang
• Publisher: the Op games
• Players: 2-6
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20-25 min
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3Hrv5eU
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

LURE AND NUZZLE! The Purr-fect Challenge Awaits!! The mischievous cat has vanished into the house, and it’s up to you to coax them out! But how will you do it? With an arsenal of irresistible toys of course! Dangle a fishing rod, roll a yarn ball, or tempt them with a running mouse. Will you be able  to lure the cat out of hiding and into your loving arms?

Do you understand what the cat wants? Try to get as close to the cat as possible without passing it by.  Lure the Cat, Outsmart Opponents – Use irresistible toys and clever tactics to coax the cat your way in this fun-filled card game of strategy and surprise!

To set up, construct the room out of the four room cards so that the interest track running along the bottom of the cards is in numerical order.  Each player places one of their two cats at the start of this interest track, the other is placed on the set of shelves on the leftmost Room card.  The Toy cards (1 per suit in the game) are laid out in a random order underneath the Interest track.  

To start each round, the deck of Lure cards is shuffled and one is randomly revealed, the paw print in the bottom right tells everyone what the target number is for this round. The deck is reshuffled and players are dealt a hand of cards; the number of cards is dependent on both the player count as well as the number of rounds already won by that player – in general, the more wins you have, the more cards you get dealt.

Starting with the player who won the previous round, players take turns playing one card at a time under the toys laid out on the table until each item has two cards below it. The sum of these two cards is the value of this item. Each player sums the value of each item remaining in their hand to determine where they should place their token on the track. Whoever is closest to the cat without passing it has won the round; multiple winners are possible. (If all players have passed the cat, whoever passed it least wins.)

Winners move their personal token forward on their playing card, which indicates how many rounds they have won and how many cards they receive. Each time you win, you start the round with one more card in hand, making your next victory harder! Whoever first wins three rounds wins the game.

My thoughts on the game

Cat Between Us is one of those games where you think that you should have a lot of control over what is happening, but ultimately, you don’t.  Here, you try to play your cards to leave yourself with the right things in your hand.  Of course, you don’t know the value of those cards until the second card is played underneath that suit on the board.

It’s pretty easy to overshoot the target, though this is a nice catch-up mechanism.  As you win a round, you’ll get more cards dealt to you, and thus, it is much more likely that you’ll overshoot the target number and therefore have no chance at winning the current round.

Sure, it’s easy peasy to try to hold onto cards that you know the value of…. But generally, you’re forced to make decisions before the color value is locked in – and while you get to play a card each turn, you obviously have no control over what other people will play.

The rules are adequate, but I feel that the examples are really quite bad – not really clarifying how to score your hand.  The one example that has a player with multiple cards of a single color – scores a suit which is worth zero points; so the reader has no idea if the value of that color should be multiplied or not.  We eventually figured out that each card has a value and they are added if you have multiples.  Despite the confusion on the rules, the game is enjoyable enough – though admittedly, there is a lot of math involved.

If you like math or cats, this is probably a game worth trying.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Dan B. (1 play): I agree there’s not a huge amount of control, but it’s a short light game. With three players I felt there was enough control to make the game interesting. I don’t know that I’d want to play with five or six.

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3Hrv5eU