Bezier Games

The Next Best Trick-Taking Game

By Ted Alspach - Founder & CEO Bezier Games, Inc.

Rarely does a game come along with a theme that’s so perfectly intertwined with the gameplay as you’ll find in Cat in the Box Deluxe Edition. The game is inspired by the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, where a cat is placed in a sealed box with poison, and quantum mechanics implies that the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened and you view the results, at which time it is one or the other.

Fortunately, Cat in the Box takes a less grim interpretation of this, and assumes that the cat is in a vat with a variety of dyes, and the cat is all colors until it is observed. In the game, you have a hand of numbered cat cards that are both all colors and no colors…until you play them according to standard tricktaking rules and declare what color (suit) they are.

The color of each played cat is marked on a central “experiment” board, which lets all players know which numbers of each color have been played. For instance, if you played a blue 8 card, because it has been played no one else can play it. Eventually some of the colors will run out of numbers that can be played, or you might declare that you are out of a certain color by removing a token from that color on your personal player board. When either of those happen, you can no long play cards of that color.

There are 4 colors in the game (including red, which is the “trump” color), but there are 5 copies of each number. So you may end up with a card (or more) in your hand that can’t be played, either because those spots are taken up on the Experiment board, or because you’ve declared you’re out of a color that that number might be available on. If it happens that you can’t play any of the cards in your hand, the round instantly ends before you play a card (doing so would create a paradox, and be disastrous for the spacetime continuum).

In addition to managing your hand to avoid a paradox, you’ll be trying to take tricks for points. If you accurately predict a bid of how many tricks you take each round, you’ll receive points from the largest contiguous area of your tokens on the central experiment board. However, you have to stop the game due to a paradox, you’ll get negative points for any tricks taken, and forfeit your trick prediction bonus.

Cat in the Box Deluxe Edition plays out in less than 30 minutes, and supports 2-5 players. It comes with gorgeously illustrated cat cards, a recessed thought experiment central board, 5 recessed player boards, and more than 60 custom designed translucent tokens.