A house full of cats?!

It’s been a hot minute since we played a roll&write, even though we love them and own a lot of them - so when we got the opportunity to test out House of Cats from Aporta Games we were happy to accept! ☺️ House of Cats will be released and available at SPIEL23!

You are basically using dice to fill up your home with rooms, cats and mice, though in usual roll&write fashion the theme isn’t the focus.
The game concept itself is simple but brilliant: 🧐 each round 4 dice are rolled and players have to choose 3 die faces to draw onto their sheet. These don’t have to connect to previous parts, but the 3 symbols have to be adjacent to each other, which provides the main challenge of the game.

Dice can show mice 🐭 or cats 🐱 - you draw these in, and they score in different ways depending on which of the four sheets of the game you are playing with;
Or they can show the values 2, 3, 4 or 5. You use these to make rooms. As soon as you have two 2s, three 3s, four 4s or five 5s orthogonally adjacent, you get to draw a wall around them, plus circle in the appropriate ability too. This is a fun twist: 🙂 each game you randomly choose 4 ability tiles, one for each number. For each completed room you get to use that ability once. This keeps subsequent games interesting!

You play until a player’s house is completely filled with symbols, then you check who scored the most points. 🏆 Like I mentioned, the 4 different sheets that come with the game will have different rules, so cats and mice will be used in different ways, plus you will score your completed rooms and other bonuses.
Games are over fast, and I like the challenge level. You just pick 3 out 4 dice, but it can be a difficult choice. With such games there is always a juicy push-your-luck element, as you risk some high scoring plays, just to run yourself into a dead end - or sometimes win big! 😎 I am a big fan of the design space of roll&writes, and House of Cats brings a new fun spin to the formula! 😸