Card shedding with cat psychopomps?

Today we have 🐱 Catopomp, a card-shedding and ladder climbing game, in which you lead a team of cat psychopomps (dubbed Catopomps 😉) to guide lost souls to the afterlife. As usual, the goal is to get rid of your dealt cards as soon as possible, while playing higher and higher valued sets of cards - but there are some fresh ideas mixed in!

When playing cards you have to play 1 or more, that are either the same value or a consecutive set. The next player always has to play a stronger set or pass. If everyone passes, the last set is discarded and the owner of it gets to play a new set of cards. Simple so far, but here comes the first twist: 🧐 Your hand of cards is called “Heaven”, and whenever you play a card from there you have to put a single card to the table in front of you which is your “Hell”. You can always decide whether to play from your Heaven or Hell, but you can never mix them. 

The second twist is how when someone passes, the people owning the current strongest set gets to pass a card from their Hell to the passer’s Hell, getting rid of cards. (Although sometimes you might want to hold on to those Hell cards, if you have built a strong set there).

Then for the third twist: 🎲 Dice ! There is a shared pool of dice that you can use for a dice boost - which means taking 1 or 2 dice and adding them as if they were an additional card to strengthen your set. You can only do this once in each round though.

The game continues until all but one player has shed their cards. That last player loses a soul gem. Lose both gems and you lose the game - everyone else wins! 😄🏆

💭I love seeing new spins on the ladder-climbing formula, and the twists here work well. That said, despite the “2-4 players” on the box, the game doesn’t really shine at 2p. You have almost perfect information and rounds are over way too fast, especially with the rule for passing. There are some special cards that help with this, but I’d still say, aim for 3-4p if possible. Last but not least, we love the cat theme, and the illustrations and presentation are beautiful! 🤩