Cats, Baskets and Fish

There's something immensely satisfying about polyomino games. Fitting strange shaped tiles together, eliminating gaps and shaping the layout to score points is always an enjoyable puzzle whatever the theme. Cover those tiles in beautifully drawn cats and Isle Of Cats from designer Frank West was already onto a winner.

The premise of the game, which is set in the same universe as the designers pervious games, has you competing to rescue cute felines from their island home before the arrival of the worlds big bad, Lord Vesh.

Each round starts with the players gaining fish, the games currency, and then drafting seven cards. Once drafted you pick cards to move into your hand, spending the required fish to do so while remembering to keep some fish back as bait for the cats. This is need to buy the cards gives the drafting a nice twist as you ponder over which cards you can afford to keep against the tantalising lure of saving those fish for the next round when you may have a better hand.

As I just mentioned capturing cats costs fish but you’ll also need baskets (these are clearly not animals who understand their plight). These can either be purchased in the form of reusable tokens or found on cards in your hand. You can only save as many cats as you have baskets which means there’s a continual need to ensure you draft enough baskets each round or risk missing out on cats. Once captured the cats are placed into your boats following a few simple rules (adjacency, not hanging off the side, that kind of thing).

Despite your altruistic motives the cats prove to be fussy travellers and while the primary goal of the game is to fill as much space on your boat as possible you'll also need to factor in the knowledge that cats are far happier sailing in family groups. To reflect this endgame scoring is based on how well you've grouped them on your ship so it's not always a case of just grabbing the best shape, you’ll also need to decide if the colour works for you too.

The other key part of endgame scoring is lesson card objectives. These cards come in two flavours, public and private, and form part of your drafted hand. Public ones, as the name suggest, are revealed to the table, private ones held back in a personal pile to be scored at the end. Some of these can offer huge scoring opportunities so in many ways are as vital to your success as the cats themselves.

There's no denying Isle of Cats is fun, the game flows wonderfully and the presentation is flawless, the cats themselves have real charm and the way they sprawl across the tiles in poses instantly recognisable as typically cat like is perfect. However, as with any drafting game there can be times, especially in a two player game where there are less cards in play, when fate degrees a bad hand through no fault of your own which can be frustrating if you’ve not got a few spare fishes or baskets carried over from the previous round to work with.

It’s also possible to have games where the lesson cards you see later in the game simply don't mesh with what you've been doing but happen to fit perfectly with an opponents layout which can feel a little unfair as they are gifted a big scoring chance. There's obviously an argument that you should therefore draft those cards to stop them getting them but how much brain space you have to rapidly analyse the risk/reward of that during the draft will vary from player to player. 

Despite those two niggles there's a lot of fun to be had with Isle of Cats, it looks great, its quick to learn and contains enough depth and variation that it'll become a regular on your table in no time. The inclusion of a more family friendly variation in the box is a lovely touch too opening it up as a great gateway game as well.