Cute cats everywhere

We have seen Explore and Draw a lot on our feed so we have been very excited to try it too. 🤩 We were not disappointed! 😻

Explore and Draw is the flip and write variant of Isle of Cats - you will be drawing cat shapes with colored sharpies instead of placing cardboard tiles. The game is played over 7 rounds. Each round a 4x3 grid is filled by drawing 12 cards. Some of them are drawn from the cat deck, some of them from the lessons deck. Players simultaneously have to pick a column and use all 3 cards in it in any order. 😼 Cats and treasures are drawn into your boat with the matching colored sharpie. If you get lessons - which give you end game scoring objectives - you mark it on your lessons board to keep track.

The most important rule is that you have to draw every new shape adjacent to an existing one. This makes all the end game scoring conditions hard to achieve:
🔸️ You try to place matching colored cats next to each other. Families of 3+ net you points.
🔸️ You try to cover every room and every rat of the boat, to avoid getting minus points.
🔸️ And of course you have to be careful so you can achieve lesson cards you drafted.

Some of the lesson cards seem particularly hard to achieve, especially because you have to draw in every shape of the column you choose - this why I got such a low score: I was too afraid to go for lessons 😸 I guess I learned a "lesson" there 😹 (pun intended)

I think Explore and Draw is a very clever, streamlined take on Isle of Cats:
✅️ It gets rid of the card drafting which for me really bogged down the gameplay of the original - now you have much snappier turns, while still having the satisfying part of filling up the rooms of the boat with tricky polyomino-shapes.
✅️ Much much smaller footprint - both on the table and on the shelf
☑️ Unfortunately you have about the same amount of card shuffling between games. 😸
❌️ Of course you lose the tactility of playing with physical tiles. It also takes some mental gymnastics to rotate and flip complex shapes in your head to see where they fit. 😿