Cat Café is a roll & write game set in a Cat Café.
But can you tempt the cats to your corner?
Make your corner in the Cat Café the best one possible! Entice cats by literally drawing toys for the cats to play with. Place the toys in the most favorable way possible, and you win by attracting the most cats!
Cat Café Game Play
Each player has a sheet and a pencil. A number of dice equal to one plus the number of players is put in the middle of the table.
One player will roll the dice and players take a turn drafting one into their play area.
Players will either draw items on their sheet, or ‘pass’ to circle 3 kitty footprints on their sheet. More on those shortly.
Where players draw on their sheet and what they draw is will depend on the dice values they have access to. One value is the number on the die they drafted, and the other will be on the undrafted die which is used by all players.
The items you will draw are on the bottom of the sheet. You draw one of the 6 things below, depending on the number of course:
- House (Then choose one of the items not yet scored and gain 2 points for each of that item marked on your sheet)
- Wool
- Butterfly (Also circle 2 kitty footprints for each butterfly)
- Bowl
- Cushion
- Mouse
The value on the other die will show you which row the item will be drawn on and can be added to any unmarked space in any column matching that number.
You can cross out a circled kitty footprint to adjust the value of a die by +/-1 per footprinted used.
End of Round & Scoring
Once all players have finished, check if anyone has completed a full column of the cat tower. The first time a player fills a column, the player or players that did it this round circle the larger number of points. Players on a future turn that complete that column circle the lower score.
The dice are rolled again for a new round and this continues until a round where any player has 3 complete columns, then the game ends.
Players score each of the 6 categories:
Cat House: Add up the points scored when placing a house on your sheet
Ball of Wool: Count the number of Balls in each column and the player with the most gets 8 points. Any other player with at least 1 ball gains 3 points.
Butterfly Toy: Score 3 points for each
Food Bowl: Score 1 point for each different item adjacent to each food bowl.
Cushion: Score points equal to the floor number it is in.
Mouse Toy: 2/6/12/20 points depending on the number of adjacently connected mouse toys.
The player with the most points is the winner!
Theme
Could literally crowbar anything into this. Cat Cafes are cute and used to be very popular a couple of years before this game was released which is when I assume the design process started?
Nothing here says “This is a Cat Cafe only game”.
Setup
Page, Pencil, Dice, Done.
Components & Artwork
Very standard components. Just sheets of paper and standard D6s. The scoring boxes do not line up with the thing they score for, they’re just out of line slightly. This could have been made easier to read.
The art is cute but VERY minimal.
Ease of Teaching & Accessibility
Very easy to teach the basics. Some scoring elements are tricky and not very straightforward. The houses are the most complicated part so if you understand that you’re all good.
It’s all open information though you can talk through new players options when it’s their turn to draft a die.
Cat Café Summary
There are plenty of Roll & Writes out there with Welcome To… still my favourite I think. All I want from these is speed, strategy and above everything else, rules light-ness. When playing multiplayer solitaire like this I need to know everyone is doing OK.
I also like to have an interesting theme which is why I like Welcome To…
It’s an OK game though. With so many Roll & Write games, most of them will get lost. For example, we played Ganz Schön Clever shortly after this so this wasn’t even the best roll & write we played that day.
So if the theme interests you give it a go, otherwise, try one of the many others.
Jesta ThaRogue