I do not judge a game by its cover, but...

As we did our final rounds on Sunday of SPIEL23 we saw a game that we wanted to buy due to the cover art alone: it was Cat Horror Festival by Invedars Games 🗡️🙀! Unfortunately it was already sold out, but now I found a store selling it so it was perfect as an early Christmas present. 🥰 The art is just awesome, you have all these cats playing the roles of iconic horror movie villains, like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees or the clown from IT. It's so funny! 😄

The game itself is all about hand management. 🤲 Each game there are 3 objectives, each of them requires players to have a certain number of sets of different cards. 🎞️ For example “2x3” means 2 different sets of 3 cards. An important detail is that you have to match this exactly, so you cannot have excess cards❗ ☝️ Managing your hand of cards is a difficult task.

Each turn you draw a new card and then have to play one: either swapping it for one in the display, or activating its ability. Every card shows a type of card in its top-left corner, which is the type you could swap it for. The abilities themselves are either drawing or discarding cards in some way.

Another twist is how the game is split up into rounds: 🧐 whenever someone completes an objective, they mark it with their token, then everyone discards their cards and you reshuffle everything for the next round and start again. This means you could be one turn away from getting a crazy 1x6 set for the win, then have to lose it all. 🙉 You play rounds until someone completes all 3 objectives, so game length can fluctuate a lot - winning 3-0 or 3-2 in a 2p is almost a 50% length difference, and with more players it would be even longer.

For this reason the game definitely overstays its welcome and draws out longer than it should for a small card game. 😶 However I still can't help but love it, and can certainly recommend it 😍 - the art and theme are just so good, and the hand management is engaging! Even though I'm not a fan of house rules, this game calls for some, like drawing more than 3 objectives for more flexibility, and only playing until 2 are met. 👍