Race against your rivals to serve up a cat’s supper in The Cat Mitt Game.
Gimmick games come in all shapes and sizes, but I don’t think a board game has ever, ever required me to don oven-mitts and try to agitate pieces out of a ball… but, hey, there’s a first time for everything, right? I think that pretty much sums up the The Cat Mitt experience, at least as how people will see it from a distance. You’ll probably know whether you’re interested in it by now on not.
Look, I probably don’t need to spend long explaining how to play this. The real fun, and the whole meat of the experience, isn’t really something that I can convey, and that’s because it’s about the panicked play where one player rushes to bash around a ball while another rolls dice to steal the gloves. It’s fast, it’s frantic, and there’s almost certainly going to be comments about loaded dice and thieves stealing pieces.
The Cat Mitt game is simple. Each player (up to six) takes a card with slots for five dice, an order card is laid out, and players feed the dice into the ball. A player fetches the gloves and ball and the next player along grabs the two Meow dice. Play then begins. The aim here is to get five dice, one at a time, into your card with the right face. You can bat the ball about but can’t grab it — perhaps closer to a hot potato rather than a cat playing with a treat ball. It’s surprisingly chaotic, sometimes the dice are simply at the wrong angle and sometimes you just end up completely changing strategy to try and get it to work… and, rarely, the next player will immediately roll Meow on both dice, ending your turn instantly and putting them into the mitts with the dice moving to the next players.
Once you get a dice out your turn isn’t over and the dice isn’t safe. You need to get the dice all the way back to your board and with the correct face facing upwards in order to lock it in. That means that if a player’s turn ends then that dice is probably going walkabout as it’s much easier to steal a dice than get a new one out.
As you can probably imagine, stealing, rapid rolling and frantic ball-bashing are constant.
The Cat Mitt Game is an easy to understand board game that doesn’t require much rules prep. It’s perhaps a bit frantic for a low-energy evening, but that’s fine because it seems to be marketed at slightly more energetic, chaotic situations.
The Catt Mitt Game is available from Amazon.
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