There are four slots for each number, one for each suit, but there are five cards of each number. If it comes to your turn and you cannot play a card, either because the four other cards in that number have been played, or because the only available slot is in a suit you declared yourself out of earlier, you cause a paradox. Despite having a 1 and a 4 in their hand, with a 1, 3, and 4 available on the main board, this player can no longer observe yellow, meaning they have caused a paradox. You watch your hand diminish before your eyes, the initial 1,048,576 or so different possible timelines for your own cards in a 4-player game collapsing into fewer and fewer concrete realities as cards are played and suits claimed. Your options don’t simply narrow as a round progresses, they fall off a cliff. I Will Follow You That’s all gone now, of course. Schrödinger’s Cat has been memeified enough that everyone knows the basics. You smile, open your mouth, say “Do any of you know about Schrö–“ and everyone shuts you down. The hoary old chestnuts simply don’t cut it anymore. This has left people like me in a difficult position. Now how are we to entertain people with advanced physics?

Plus, the production value of the new version is stunning. It includes two-player rules (which I have not played) and five-player rules. The game works well at five players. The rulebook is well written (even if a little over-written) and the components are high quality. The plastic markers are an especially nice touch. It is easy to see from the table presence of the game why so many people were drawn to Bezier’s booth at Gen Con. That all feels normal. But there is one giant twist: the cards in Cat in the Box do not have suits on them. There are simply five of each card rank in the box, even though there are only four colors in the game. Some ranks get taken out at different player counts (and the two-player rules are beyond the scope of this review), but there are always five cards of each number. This continues until a player says they cannot follow the lead colour at which point they remove their token from their player board for that colour revealing the X. This indicates to all other players that this particular player has declared they have no more cards of that colour. Everyone can now use this information to their advantage. Playing The Trump Colour And then there is the paradox. What a cool concept to tie into the game. The impossibility to play a card results in time coming to an immediate stop (and the game). I haven’t equally been in awe and dread of a mechanic like this in a long time. Dan B. (7 plays): It’s a great idea, so I want to like the game more than I do… but in too many hands I don’t feel as if my decisions end up mattering very much. I think there’s the illusion of more freedom than there actually is. I don’t love the bonus scoring which can benefit people with certain hands much more than others. And the paradoxes bother me, although not as much as they bother Joe. That all being said I am still willing to play it, but I think my previous “like it” rating has devolved to “neutral.”As cards are eliminated on the board, it becomes more and more challenging to play a legal card. If for some reason you can’t or don’t want to play a card to follow suit (for example, the only numbers you have available in a given suit are already eliminated), you can declare you don’t have any more of that color and you can play another one (including the red trump suit). Once you declare you don’t have a certain color, you won’t be allowed to play it again during the round. What is usually a tense game full of “will I or won’t I” now because a head-to-head strategy game. It works, but it’s a different feel and doesn’t have the full circle of choices that comes with the 3, 4, or 5-player count. I love the way the pressure to not cause a short-suit paradox in the late game leads to a single suit filling up in the early game; this makes it difficult to get intra-suit runs, like our 6/7/8 we were hoping for. This fear causes you to want to keep the sets (like the three 5s), but as we discussed, that strategy has its own risks. There is so much to explore – in a single game and in the next game. With the group you’re playing with today, and the one you’ll play with tomorrow. It also does it with minimal rules overhead.

With that being said, Cat in the Box is an incredible achievement. There is so much depth here. And like Schrödinger’s thought experiment, you think you have it down, and then in a blink of an eye, you don’t. When you feel you have a strategy, you observe a new possibility and hope to play again. On the off chance that your little experiment just might work. The other way to end a round is for players to play all but one of their cat cards. In either eventuality it is time to go to scoring. Scoring While the game includes 4 suits in the grid, there are 5 of each number. This is one of the ways the game tempts you with the paradox. All of the cards are dealt out, but two cards will go unplayed – one is discarded by each player at the start of a hand, and the other, ideally, is left in your hand unplayed. A round of Cat in the Box ends in one of two ways: either everyone plays down to their last card, or someone causes a paradox. While there is the typical bidding mechanism in Cat in the Box, it by no means work in the usual fashion. Of course not!At Gen Con this year, I ran into a teenaged girl who was very excited to show me (or anyone in sight) that she had bought Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition, because it was “cute” and had a cat on the cover. Maybe she really knew what a brilliant but challenging game was in the box and didn’t just buy it for the adorable box art. If so, I hope she forgives me for thinking, “oh, I really hope you know what you just bought.” I love this game, but Silly Cat Game it is not. This clash of conditions creates a glorious tension throughout the round because of multiple worries. Simultaneously. Again.

A person would not know if the not-real cat is alive or dead until they open the box. They would consider the cat alive and dead simultaneously, and its actual status is only known once the box is opened, aka “observed.” Shuffle the cat cards and deal them equally to all players (ten cards for a two, three or four player game and nine cards for a five player game). Also give each player a set of player tokens and a player board. Each player then places one of their tokens on the four X’s on their player board. Choose a starting player and away we go. Dealing Cards As for trump cards, you can’t lead with a trump card unless you’ve declared 1 suit is gone from your hand. At that point, you’ll be able to play or lead with the trump card. If it becomes impossible for a player to play any of the cat cards from their hand because all of the numbers are taken then they must declare a paradox. This immediately ends the round. End Of Round Simon sighs with resignation. He’s out of Diamonds, so he plays the 2 of Clubs. Since it’s not in the lead suit, it won’t do anything. This is a lost cause.James Nathan (8 plays): I originally reviewed Cat in the Box on the blog in January 2022 and still love it. 🙂 The game includes a grid showing the potential cards that can be played, and players have tokens that they’ll place in the grid to show the cards they have played. That is, if you play an 8 from your hand and declare it to be yellow, no player will be able to play a yellow 8 later. I have spent 1,500 words, the longest straight review of my Meeple Mountain career, talking about a small card game. I could probably keep talking about it, but I should eventually go outside. Go get a copy of Cat in the Box. Buy two, even. It’s cheap, you can afford it. This game is fun, it’s dramatic, it’s funny, it’s crunchy. It is, in a word, neat. A Brief Note Pertaining to the Use of Combinatorics

Speaking of player count, it is possible to play a 2-player variant of the game. But it’s very different from regular gameplay. With the way the number of cards vs. the number of board spaces works out, it is now elementary to avoid a paradox. My review for Cat In The Box is available here so please go and have a read if you want to know if this is the kind of game you would like (hint it definitely is). Cat in the Box adds additional structure to the available card distribution by fixing the play space to exactly one of each card in the distribution, such as 1 through 8 in each of four suits. It doesn’t do this perfectly, but puts the onus on you to make sure it works out. And if you mess it up – welcome to Paradox City! The hand ends, adversely for you, and closer to fine for the other players. This bonus centers around the patterns players have created with their tokens on the central board. There’s no penalty for missing your bid, but if you hit it exactly, you’ll earn 1 extra point per token you have in your largest orthogonal grouping on the board. It’s this mini-game which drives the larger arc of the game and makes the game a treasure, and not simply a novelty.Cat in the Box’s….box, that takes the bifurcated suits and ranks and corrals them, is what enables everything else to flourish: the grid placement, the short suit declarations, and the paradoxes. This review is of the Deluxe Edition, which is what was released last year. It adds components for a fifth player, and it features nicer components. To my knowledge, the Deluxe Edition is also the only available edition: the first version is out of print. So players declare the suit when they play a card. For instance, if the lead player plays a 3 and says it was green, they mark that they did so on the Green 3 space on the board (there are tokens of each player’s token to mark with). Only one player can occupy each space. The starting player will play a lead cat card and will declare what colour it is (not red at this point). They will then use one of their tokens to cover the colour / number option on the research board. Dan B. (3 plays):I like the idea a lot, and it’s worked well enough so far… but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s solvable in some sense, i.e. that with more experience a player with a certain hand distribution can dictate the outcome. But I could well be wrong. And it’s definitely better than dois, which I am much more certain has issues.