Cat In The Box: Deluxe Edition Review

August 5, 2024

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From a quantum superposition point of view, Cat in the Box might be a trick-taking game while simultaneously it might not be a trick-taking game. Confused? Welcome to quantum mechanics. Before we touch on why on Earth we’re talking about this in a review of a card game, let’s get the important part out of the way first. Cat in the Box is a trick-taking game, and Cat in the Box is a great game. Each round of each game offers so many different ways to approach it, and the novel approach of a card not having a suit until you declare it really sets it apart from its competition.

Schrödinger’s what?

Some of you might be aware of the classic thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat. It refers to the idea of quantum superposition, where something can be considered to be in two different states at the same time. In the experiment, a cat is sealed in a box with a vial of poison, a Geiger counter, and a radioactive substance. If the substance decays the Geiger counter reacts, breaks the vial, and the poor cat loses one of its nine lives. The thing is, you don’t know for sure whether it’s happened until you open the box. Until the moment of observation, it can be considered to be both alive and dead.

a hand full of cards — What’s going on here? None of these cards has a colour on it…

That’s all well and good, but what’s it got to do with this game? If you know traditional trick-taking games, you know there are usually four suits of cards, and in each trick, you usually try to follow the lead suit with a card of your own. In Cat in the Box, none of the cards have a suit. Instead, they can all be all of the suits at once. When you play a card, it’s at that point you decide what suit it is. At the start of each game, that’s as easy as saying “I’m playing this five as green”, where green could also be yellow or blue, and put that card next to the green side of your player board as a reminder. Everybody follows the led suit and plays cards of their own, and the highest card wins the trick.

So far, so easy, you might think, and you’d be right. However, there are a couple of pretty big spanners you can throw into the mix, but your choice of spanners and when you want to toss them in depends on your ability to predict the future.

Telling the future – what’s in your cards?

In each round, after you’ve been dealt your hand you have to make a prediction. How many tricks do you think you’ll win? You mark that number on your player board with one of your tokens, and it’ll typically be something between one and four. Let’s say you bid low and proclaim “I will win but one trick this round. My word is my bond”, because you’ve been dealt a hand of ones, twos, and threes. You win your solitary round but in a later round, the cards in your hand mean that to play one of them, you’ll win another. Not the worst result in the world, but it does put you out of the running for claiming a bonus at the end of the round.

a look at a player board — You place a marker on one of the spaces in the middle of your board to make a prediction.

At this point you might be wondering why you can’t just play another Yellow One, for instance. There’s a board in the middle of the table with all possible values for each colour visible at the start of each round. Once a value in a suit has been used, the person who claimed it places one of their tokens there, and it makes that card unplayable again in a future trick. e.g. if someone has already played a Yellow One, nobody else can. What a pain in the arse.

Remember before, when I said you decide what colour a card is? That’s true of the cards in your hand too. If you had a five in your hand for example, but following the led colour would win you a trick you don’t want to win, you can just say “I don’t have any yellow cards left”, and play a different colour. You discard the token of the colour you just said you don’t have any more from your player board, and you may not play it again for the rest of the round. Obviously that restricts what you can do for the rest of the round, but it might just save your bacon.

main board covered in player markers — The low numbers have all been taken with a big group of adjacent red markers.

If you look at that picture of the board above you’ll notice that there’s a red suit too. Red in Cat in the Box is special. It’s the trump suit, which means if you play a card as red when everyone else has played a different colour, you will win the trick. The snag is that you can’t play red at the start of the round. You can only do that once someone (even you) has broken suit and declared they can’t play another colour. Once that happens, red is up for grabs and it makes for some seriously interesting gameplay, not to mention being a great way to grab tricks you’d otherwise have lost.

Causing a paradox

Knowing that each number in each colour can only be played once, you might realise that situations arise where there’s nothing possible for someone to play. Even if they break suit, they might only have threes and fours in their hand, but all the threes and fours are taken. What then? Then you cause a paradox, and the round ends immediately. Why is it a paradox? Because you can only play a card that’s already been played.

Causing a paradox is bad, mmmkay? You don’t want to do it. If you do then instead of gaining a point per trick you won, you lose a point per trick. This is especially bad if you predicted you’d win four and actually managed to! It adds a juicy, sharp, but really enjoyable bit of tension to the end of every round, like biting into a lemon, and I love it.

There’s another really cool little something extra in the scoring at the end of each round. As the round progresses and numbers get covered on the main board with player markers, groups of adjacent markers grow. If you exactly meet your prediction for tricks won, you also get a point per marker in your largest adjacent group.

There’s just so much to consider if you want to play well. Will your cards win you tricks? Can you create big groups of markers? How many tricks can you realistically win? It’s amazing how much depth is generated by such a simple concept. I wondered how Can in the Box could possibly live up to the hype, but it does.

Final thoughts

This is quite a long review for what is essentially a simple card game. A lot of that is because I’ve explained almost everything you need to be able to play the game, and as someone who prides himself on not just writing reviews that are rules regurgitations, it leaves me with mixed feelings. I think it’s justified on this occasion though. If I want you to understand what makes this game so intriguing and so much fun, you have to understand the nuances which differentiate Cat in the Box from its peers.

The decision to commit to a different colour and prevent yourself from being able to use that colour for the rest of the round is a big one, and that’s where this game shines. In big decisions which feel like small ones. How many tricks do you predict you’ll win? Which colours do you choose to abandon? Which one of your dealt cards do you choose to discard before the round starts? All are quick choices you’re forced to make in the moment, and choices you’ll make as many times as there are players in your game.

While I’m talking about the number of players, it’s worth mentioning that although you can play Cat in the Box with two players, it doesn’t really work as well as with any other count and requires special rules. Three, four and five players are all great, however, and I’ll happily play at any of those counts.

Forget the theme, it’s as thin as the shrinkwrap around the box, but Cat in the Box is right up there with Aurum (review here) for my favourite trick-taking game ever.

You can buy this game from my retail partner, Kienda. Remember to sign-up for your account at kienda.co.uk/punchboard for a 5% discount on your first order of £60 or more.