Boop Shuffle

• Designer: Scott Brady
• Publisher: Smirk & Dagger
• Players: 2
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://link.amazon/B06YRS28W
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

A crazy, cute & surprisingly challenging strategy card game for two, based on the best-selling, Mensa award winning game “boop.”

Flip a card, place a kitten – and “boop” all the cards next to it one space away. Find a way to boop three of your kittens into a row to graduate them into cats… then get three of your cats in a row to win.

But it isn’t that easy! You don’t know if you are drawing your kitten – or theirs. It might even be a super kitten, booping cards two spaces away, or a scaredy kitten who gets booped away anytime someone boops next to them. It’s like herding cats!
Fun new specialty cards make for a whole new strategic challenge.

To start, unroll the neoprene strips that will establish the boundaries of the play space.  Shuffle the main deck of cards (the kittens).  Place the side deck – the adult cat cards – off to the side, arranged by type.

The active player draws a card from the main deck and then places it on the board.  After the first card is played, all other cards must be placed somewhere adjacent to a previously played card (orthogonally or diagonally).  Then, after making the recommended “boop” sound effect, any kittens that are directly adjacent to this newly placed card are moved outwards by one space in the direction of the adjacency.  If there is another tile in the way, a tile won’t move.  Also, if a tile is pushed out of the boundaries of the 6×6 grid, it is removed from play.

There are also specialty cards such as Wild Kittens/Cats, Super Kitties/Cats, Scaredy Kittens, and a Blankie.  The Blankie can temporarily remove a card from play by putting the feline underneath it into catnap mode. The Wilds can be either color Kitten/Cat when placed. The Super and Scaredy cards introduce new movement rules for the Kittens and Cats so that when they boop, it’s not as simple as moving away one space because now you may have felines booping two spaces away, jumping over other felines, or causing chain reaction boops. 

If you get 3 Kittens/Cats of your color in a row, then they grow up to be Cats.  The kittens that made up the 3-in-a-row are removed from the game, and 3 Cat cards are taken from the Side Board and put into the discard pile.   You can also graduate a single Cat if you have 8 of your cats/kittens on the board at one time.  Note that you can only Graduate cats on your turn.  If your opponent creates a 3-in-a-row of your color, that line has to survive your card play in order for you to graduate.  

Once the draw pile is exhausted, the discard pile is shuffled into a new deck.  This will now have both Kittens and Cats in it.  Rules change a bit now because Cats boop everything by a space, but a kitten is too small and cannot boop an adult Cat.

The game is won by the player who is able to line up 3 of their Cat cards in a row or the first to have 8 Cats anywhere on the board.

My thoughts on the game

Boop Shuffle is a clever little two player game that has a lot of chaos and unpredictable action.  You draw a random card each turn and must play it – and you’ll have to make decisions on where to place it based on which color cat/kitten it is.  It’s a bit tricky to foresee how the cards will move around after the booping, but you’ll get the hang of it after a few games. 

It’s definitely thinkier than it looks.  Don’t be swayed into thinking it’s a kids game because of the cute art and the adorable cats on the cards. You’ll definitely need a fair bit of advanced planning to get the cats into the arrangement you want.  It’s almost as difficult as herding IRL cats.  Not that I’ve tried that, but I’ve heard it’s hard.

The game slowly evolves as the kitten cards are slowly but surely replaced by Cat cards.  If one player has a disproportionate amount of graduations on the first pass through the deck, it could lead to a snowball victory – as full grown Cats are not booped by kittens, and this can make it quite hard to move them out of the way, thus making more 3-in-a-rows easier to set up.

The game certainly plays quickly, even in a closely fought battle – but as I mentioned earlier, there is a fair bit of strategy that can be applied to what looks to be a whimsical game.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Matt C.:  My family loves Boop! Technically, I guess we have the Halloween version which is Booooooop! Or something. This card game is missing the physical kitty-bits we like, so that’s a bit of a miss. However, as it’s mostly just cards it is slightly more portable. To be fair, the base game isn’t that big. Everything new in Boop Shuffle adds a bit of complexity and randomness. The randomness isn’t too bad, but the simplicity of Boop! is a big part of its charm. Adding in more rules (cat powers, etc…) will keep it out of play at our house. It might yet see some play as a travel game.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Matt C. (Boop!)
• I like it. Matt C. 
• Neutral. Dale Y (Boop Shuffle)
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://link.amazon/B06YRS28W