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Empty: A room is empty only if all of its squares are uncovered. A room that has some of its squares covered is neither full nor empty. Despite its slightly downbeat starting premise, The Isle of Cats is a brain-teasing tile-placement game about rescuing cats and using your ship’s space efficiently to help animals - making it a deeply satisfying experience for cat fans. This variant simplifies the game into it only having a lesson phase and a rescue phase. This mode is useful for new players who are not very familiar with this game. You don’t need to be a crazy cat person to enjoy this game. The Isle of Cats upholds in depth strategy and puzzle solving whilst still being a fun and light-hearted game.
Patchwork meets pussycats Sew together comfortable quilts with the right patterns to attract cats in this wholesome puzzle game. | Image credit: AEG/Kevin Russ In Explore and Draw you are a citizen of Squalls End and are on a rescue mission to The Isle of Cats and must rescue as many cats as possible before the evil Lord Vesh arrives. Each cat has a unique shape and colour and must be squeezed onto your boat. Cats being cats, like to keep in their families and like coloured cats should be kept together to score more points. Despite having written four paragraphs of flaws, none of them are a major issue and most are barely noticeable after a couple of games. Think of them as more the quirks of owning any cat – occasionally frustrating but never enough to stop you from loving it. Family Mode The first thing in the Isle of Cats Big Box is the big box itself! This is a very cleverly designed box and insert with compartments perfectly designed to fit the base game and all of the expansions. I love big box storage solutions. When I love a game and collect all the expansions, the amount of space they take up becomes a concern. Being able to condense the multitude of boxes into one and speed up the setup feels like a good investment.
The Isle of Cats
There are additional discovery cards that are only used when playing with 5 or 6 players. However, the lesson modules can be used with any number of players. Let’s be clear from the start: The Isle of Cats is a great game, a delicious fusion of intertwining decisions. Drafting Cards – The Exciting Decision
Some of the new cards include ‘7 points if you have covered exactly 3 treasure maps’, ’25 points if the middle row of your boat is empty’ and 9 points if you have a group of at least 5 treasures’. Having new lessons to achieve is definitely my favourite part of this expansion. Overall The Kitten module adds more importance on being the fastest player each day and introduces new options in the form of kittens, without adding much complexity to the game.The extra-special quality upheld by The City of Games publishers prevails within The Isle of Cats. There is attention to detail with each card, meeple and token. Clearly, a lot of love and thought has gone into the making of The Isle of Cats. The legend of an Isle of Cats is real! But it is threatened by the approaching armies of Vesh Darkhand, who will stop at nothing to destroy the island and its feline inhabitants! After each player has selected a column and resolved all the cards, The Island is discarded and a new round is set up. A new Island is created, the Vesh token moves along one space and then play continues. The game ends when the Vesh token moves to the last space and end game scoring is triggered.
The family mode (an easier mode ideal for inexperienced players) features the cat placement only. This guarantees for a fun yet not overly complicated game. Any unplayed cards remain in your hand for the next day. You do not have to pay for them again and there is no limit to how many cards you may have in your hand. Any fish you have not used are kept and carry over to the next day. There are many elements which come together to make this boardgame addictive. However the polyomino style placement (geometric shapes like those in Tetris) is the highlight of the game. There is something extremely satisfying about slotting high quality tiles together and arranging colourful cats. Tiles are then drawn randomly from the bag until there are 2 cat tiles per player in each of the fields to the left and the right of the central island.
Also included as part of this expansion are rat meeples, new baskets and tokens (for use as directed on certain event tiles). Not needing to pay for all your reserved cards takes a little of the edge off the draft, but it incentivises knowing what the other players are up to. It’s easy to deliberately take cards that your opponents want because you can simply discard them and often the only person that knows you’ve been an arse is you. It’s fun! Buying Cards – The Interesting Decision The Isle of Cats is a tile-laying, card drafting game for 1-4 players that takes about 60 minutes to play. Gameplay Overview: Magical moggies causing mischief Players must work together to clear up the curses before Professor Whispurr arrives, but must also earn more points than their opponents. Image: Magpie Games
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