Cat cafe: the joy of pencils
A largely forgotten game has brought our family unexpected joy- I think it's the pencils, mainly.
OK, first an admission. I really love pencils. Like, not in a sexy way, but I will use one with the slightest pretext, so pleasing to me is the feeling of the tip scratching on paper, the feel of the shaft between my fingers. And I also love sharpening them. OK, maybe it’s a tiny bit sexy. Maybe.
My love of pencils and of board games often intersect in a genre of games that is just at the end of a surge of popularity- roll& write. Broadly speaking, the play loop of these games is that a dice is rolled, something is marked on paper by each player, and this process is repeated until some milestone is reached. It’s not exactly a new genre, but one that was rejuvenated by releases such as Welcome to… which I love but which has been reviewed all over the place.
Cat Cafe, on the other hand, seems to have passed most people by. Published in 2019 by Alley Cat games, it follows the roll & write formula but gives it a few kinks (and no, I’m not talking about pencils again) as well as a charming cat-based theme.
Each player has a play sheet with 5 cat towers each with between 4 and 6 numbered spaces. The game ends when any player completes their third tower by filling it with one of six cat accessories (catcessories?). Points are awarded for completing towers, and some catcessories also affect scoring.
You are not free to put your balls of wool, mice, cat houses etc on the towers willy-nilly though. Each round, a number of dice equal to the number of players plus one is rolled. Then, in turn, each player chooses a die. Once everyone has chosen, each then uses their own die and the one left in the middle of the table to create a combination of position and catcessory- and then you draw!
This is a bit of a joy- if you want to place a mouse in position 2, you literally draw a little mouse icon. There’s something lovely about this- I am a terrible draughtsman but my mice always end up wonkily endearing.
It’s also a nice bit of gamer-y decision space- there will be particular combinations which benefit your opponents, so there is always a bit of a calculation, as you second guess their desires, and frustrate them maliciously (Again, not in a sexy way). While this game is described by the publishers as ‘light’, that is a description that only fairly seasoned gamers would go along with- there’s a bit of Castles of Burgundy in here, after all.
Once you have drawn, your catcessory may trigger some immediate game effect- the butterfly, for example, gifts you paws which you circle on the pad, and use later to manipulate the die you have taken, so that you can squeeze that crucial ball of wool to complete a tower.
It’s all a thoroughly entertaining 20-30 minutes of mildly interactive fun for 2-4 of you. As a strategic challenge, it’s imperfect- some of the icons seem rather more powerful than others in determining the final score, but there really aren’t many games in the genre that I would rather play.
I mentioned above that Roll & Write games are at the end of a period of popularity. To an extent this is just the cyclical nature of fashions, but it hasn’t been helped by a slew of releases, often cheaper adaptations of ‘proper’ games, which fail to grasp the potential of pencil and paper, instead making themselves literally into the proverbial ‘tickbox exercise’. This is a shame, as this title, and other such as Railroad Ink and the excellent Postmark Games catalogue show what is possible here. I almost reviewed Postmark’s superb Waypoints, which allows you to literally trace a path through a gorgeous national park with your pencil, but I haven’t quite played it enough yet.
So, yes. I would rather play Cat Cafe than go to a Cat Cafe (plot twist: I really don’t like cats) and, best of all, it’s literally a fiver on the publisher’s website! * How can you lose????
*price correct at time of posting