Cat in the Box is a trick-taking game where the cards don’t have a suit.
Well they do, you just don’t know it yet.
Cat in the Box is the quintessential quantum trick-taking card game where your card’s colour isn’t defined until you play it!
Cat in the Box Game Overview
Quick Rules Summary
Players get a hand of cards and predict if they will win 1, 2 or 3 tricks for the round.
Players then play a standard trick-taking game following suit if possible, red is always the trump suit and the highest card of the lead/trump suit wins.
But, when you play a card it only has the number, so the players will give it a suit by playing next to that colour on their player board. So a 3 placed next to the green becomes a green 3. Place a token on the green 3 on a board to show that card has been played so another ‘green 3’ can not be played again.
If all cards are played, or a player can not play a card because they don’t have any legal actions the round ends.
How do you win?
If a player couldn’t play a card they create a paradox and lose 1 point per trick they have won.
Everyone else gets 1 point for each trick they win. If they got their prediction correct they also score 1 point per token in their largest area of orthogonally adjacent tokens on the main board
Main Mechanisms
Well, trick-taking obviously.
USP
The ‘no suits’ thing is what sells this game.
Theme
The ‘quantum’ theme does make sense. Once you observe that you don’t have a green card in your hand you therefore can not have a green card in hand, so you can’t play one.
Setup
Hand out tokens and cards I think? You have to do some card culling depending on the player count.
Components & Artwork
I played the deluxe edition so all the bits are really nice. I’m not even sure if the non-deluxe edition of the game is available.
The art of the cats is really nice, it’s a style I really like.
Ease of Teaching
Anyone that has played a trick-taking game before has 90% of the rules nailed down.
It’s not complicated, but I would start new players off with something a little more straightforward.
Similar Games
Any standard trick-taking game with a twist really?
Something like Chronicle or Diamonds which are my faves, although the prior is a little more out there.
Cat in the Box Review
Positives
Familiar gameplay.
The whole quantum thing works really well.
Scoring is fun, you might skip winning a trick to get your prediction right. You may need to play an 8 to win the trick, but if a 4 will extend your connected tokens you could potentially end up with more end-game points.
Negatives
Gathering the cards from all the players after a trick is slow going.
The whole ‘predicting tricks’ thing is always hit-and-miss for those of us not that great at these kinds of games.
Cat in the Box Summary
A very fun game that I enjoyed a lot.
Jesta ThaRogue