Cat | Board games
2 – 6 Players; Suggested Ages: 8 and Up
Kids Games | Card Games
I don’t see the point of owning a cat. I’m not an ancient Egyptian who wishes to pray or a witch looking for a familiar. I’m neither a sailor nor a farmer and, despite being a New Yorker, I don’t have a rat problem in my apartment. The sad fact is that if I get near most cats, I puff up like a blowfish, my skin turns bright red, and I sneeze, wheeze, and cry. Allergies, man. So me and cats? Not going to happen. Ever. No matter how cute or furry or engaging they are. So why would I advocate playing one in a roleplaying game?
In the summer of 2001, I was living in the Bay Area. I met up with designer John Wick at a local convention. We were walking around, talking about games and movies and stuff, and he asked if I wanted to play in a demo of his new cat-themed RPG. So a few hours later, my cat character (a black British shorthair who spoke like Winston Churchill) and a few other cats were roaming the neighborhood, on the lookout for dogs, free food, and boggins.
Now, dogs and food are always important things to look out for, but boggins? According to John, boggins are demonic creatures that love to torment humans. The problem is that they’re invisible to humans. Some boggins sit atop people and cause them to become fat and lazy. Others whisper secrets and lies in the ears of impressionable humans in order to incite jealousy or self-doubt. These shadowy creatures become more substantial as they feed on the fears and insecurities of humans, until the boggin takes control over its unfortunate victim.
This is where our little hairy heroes fit in. Cats aren’t simple animals in this game. They are sensitive to boggins and are charged with the responsibility of protecting mankind from the boggin threat. Every thousand years, there’s a contest that takes place in the Kingdom of Dreams. In the most recent contest, the cats won the right to rule the world. Humans came dead last so the cats must protect them. You see, those humans, not having sharp teeth, claws, night vision, agility, or warm fur are kinda pathetic compared to dogs and cats if you think about it. Besides their physical qualities, cats are also magical creatures that can enter the Kingdom of Dreams and cast little spells designed to help them in their role as the guardians of humans.
This is where Cat: A Little Game About Little Heroes is the most clever. All those weird behaviors that cats exhibit? They’re explained in the game. Why do they hate getting wet? Why do cats play with prey they’ve captured? Why do cats always land on their feet? These details and many more are described in terms of this fantastic world. Because you don’t need to be a cat-lover or cat owner to know how cats act, anyone can relate to and even pretend to be a cat. The setting is your house, your backyard, your neighborhood. The people and pets therein? Those are the other characters in this world: the beagle that barks at you when you walk past his yard on the way to school; the flock of pigeons that loiter near the park, begging for crumbs of bread like it was spare change; the amiable skunk that ambles its way across your patio at nine o’clock every night. These are friend and foes, allies and antagonists.
Cat characters are rated in terms of parts of their bodies: claws, coat, face, fangs, legs, and their magical tails. The traits may be the best, or strong, or merely good. The take-away is that, of course, cats aren’t bad at anything. Actions taken in the game are similarly rated as easy, moderate, or hard. Your cat’s traits give it a number of dice to roll whenever it takes a risk. The more “evens” you roll on the dice, the better you do. Simple. And you can use any type of dice when taking risks. The system John uses in several of his games is called the Advantage System and revolves around entertainment, narrative, and drama to earn extra dice for your rolls. A player whose cat is hiding from a pack of dogs could narrate: “It’s dark, raining, and I’m sitting up high on a dumpster.” Because those three facts contribute to the cat’s stealth attempt, that player earns three bonus dice.
Do I need to mention that cats have nine lives? These are used like a combi-nation of hit points and drama dice, allowing cats to avoid trait-damaging scars or to take risks without a chance of failure. Add a reputation mechanic and style points, and the Advantage System used for Cat is quick, fun, and puts emphasis on the players’ decisions.
What makes Cat so special is its accessibility. The book is a slim tome just over 40 pages long, a far cry from the usual roleplaying game running hundreds of pages. The artwork is just public domain clip art of animals, the text is light and engaging, the rules are just interesting enough without being weighed down by the boggin of realism. In keeping with the independent RPG spirit, it’s a game you can read in an hour or two and play with your friends that night. Cat’s simplicity is a merit. Although meant to be played with adventures set in your own backyard, some have successfully ported the game to fantasy realms, pirate ships, and even the bridge of the Nostromo in deep space, where it’s Jones the Cat and not Ellen Ripley who is the true protagonist facing off against the Alien — or is that just a big, toothsome boggin?
Cat invites families to get together and play a roleplaying game. One that’s full of adventure and danger but not violence and bloodshed. A game where kids are encouraged to not just use their imaginations to create the characters but to have a vested interest in the game world through their ability to change it. Using Catas a vehicle for storytelling and sharing, parents and children can collaborate on these tales of brave feline heroes. The monsters are scary but fantastical, while still based enough in reality that children can understand them.
Much like Kipling’s Just So Stories, Cat explains our reality through fables that each contain a nugget of truth . . . and in doing so strives for a greater Truth that cannot be encompassed by mere fact. The Truth is that people are noble but frail creatures and may not be able to handle every situation without help. And, as with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, this help can come in the smallest and most unlikely of forms. Are the heroes feline guardians that can enter the dreams of sleeping humans and save them from nightmarish intruders, or are the real heroes of the stories the tellers themselves, unfettered by adult concerns and able to create and imagine what jaded eyes cannot? In Cat, they’re one and the same, and just playing the game is enough to keep the boggins at bay.
Cat’s subject matter is instantly recognizable and beloved by many, including that much-vaunted demographic of female gamers and children. It’s a roleplaying game that needs no clever pitch aside from this one: “You play cats that must protect humans from monsters they can’t see.”
And best of all, I’m not allergic to it.
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