It’s no secret that we at Boar Gamer love animals. Especially cats! We love those fuzzy bundles of joy (and chaos). We have previously reviewed cat-themed board games like Calico and the mega-popular Exploding Kittens. So, when I got offered to bring another cat-themed game from this year’s Essen Spiel, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
Cat Sudoku: Summer Festival is a teeny tiny box and one heck of a puzzle. As you can guess from the title, you’ll be placing adorable kittens in a sudoku-like grid. You don’t really need to know how to play sudoku for this one, but it sure helps, because this is – a competitive game! How can sudoku work as a competitive game? Continue reading this Cat Sudoku: Summer Festival review to find out.
The game is played on a shared 3×3 tableau. You’ll first deal one card to the center, give each player some cards, and then give them a reserve token. Your turn is pretty simple – draw a card from the top of the deck and either place it anywhere on the grid or take it into your reserves. Since this is a sudoku game, the same number must not appear in any row or column twice. The same goes for colors.
Simple, right? Well, there’s a bit more to it. Once you’ve played that one card, you can spend your reserve tokens to place cards from your reserves. This extra action costs two tokens and you can keep playing cards on your turn as long as you’ve got tokens to pay for them. Each card has a special placement goal on it which, if you manage to fulfill, rewards you with 1 reserve token.
Another important piece of this puzzle is that you can overlap cards on the central tableau. As long as there’s no marker on a card (denoting that it was the last card added), you can play a card over it while following the placement rules of no matching numbers and colors. This is such a big thing and a total game-changer. You’ll start thinking spatially, trying to play cards over each other and trying to disrupt other players from scoring big at the end of the game. Also also, you never play with a whole deck, so there are always a few cards left in the box, oftentimes crucial elements to your strategy.
To win a game of Cat Sudoku: Summer Festival, you’re not actually tasked with completing the 3×3 sudoku board. You’re only trying to make the best score (ideally, 7-8-9) in one of the lines. Each player is assigned a different row, so you’ll absolutely need to sabotage each other while building a big-scoring row for yourself. This game can turn into a catfight and players who aren’t ready to pull out their claws might not have such a blast as we did when we played this. You might not want to play this with players who do not like “mean” games for this reason.
I liked Cat Sudoku: Summer Festival. I like that it comes in such a small box that it fits in my pocket and I can carry it anywhere and teach it in under a minute. It’s cute, breezy, yet still tactical enough so players enjoyed it and wanted to re-play it. For me, it played best either as a solo board game or exclusively as a three-player game, although you will find some chaotic fun if you’re playing it with a maximum of four players where scoring zones overlap and will inevitably lead to some chaos.
You can back Cat Sudoku: Summer Festival on Kickstarter for $12.
The preview was based on the prototype provided by the publisher Sunrise Tornado.