Cute games are something I love, and Catstronauts fits the bill of being both cute and being a game where we all work together — which is a big plus. This co-op, two to four player board game has everyone becoming a space cat, equipped with their own character and player board, which has a perfect number of slots to really keep everything organized and keeps the whole thing really focused.
I do feel that its player-board centric design also makes Catstronauts very accessible to younger ages, because you can easily see everything you should have, everything you can do, and even have a little cheat-sheet card to go with your player board as well. Each round, there is a player that must go first, which is shown by the first player token. From there, whoever would best benefit the game can go next, as long as everyone agrees.
All of the cats are working towards a specific mission, which is to build the entire space station, turn on the main computer, and then get yourselves to the evac pod without the energy of the space station running out. The station does have a few starting tiles, but you will need to use at least one of your two moves on your turn to move to different rooms, gather material, and place on rooms so that you can build out the ship.
Each of the cats have their own abilities; my cat was able to take the tool type of material and turn it into a wild card, which can be very useful when building! Another character could move one extra space at the end of their turn, for example, giving them a bit of an extra boost. The various tiles that make up the ship in Catstronauts also have different abilities; one popular room allowed us to take two materials from the middle board, while another allowed us to refresh the items there.
There is a risk with taking materials in the game, as warnings can appear, which are often funny but do hinder the gameplay. We had a birthday party warning, where all cats were forced into a central room together to celebrate a birthday party. Another card broke one of our energy spots, which forced us to spend valuable time going out and fixing it, as we could not complete our mission while broken. There is ample chance to move around and gather more energy, which gives you a few more rounds to finish your mission, but it’s a balancing act of spending time to get it and using it.
Catstronauts is a very fun and high quality game. There are so many fantastic little details like the on/off token that goes on the computer room and the way the player board has your character card and an off duty side, so you can easily tell who has already gone this round. It’s just a very high quality game that’s well worth playing around with.
We did win all of our rounds of the game, although it was close a few times. We found ourselves really needing to plan ahead and work hard so that we could get all of the pieces of the space station in before we ran out of turns. One, sort of cool, feature that each of our cats had was a chant that gave us or another player an extra move. These were only able to be used once per game and were funny phrases, adding a bit more fun and chaos to our playtime in the best sort of way.
Everyone in our group really loved Catstronauts and I cannot wait to dive into the expansion and see how they change the game.
You can order Catstronauts on Kickstarter.
