So players declare the suit when they play a card. For instance, if the lead player plays a 3 and says it was green, they mark that they did so on the Green 3 space on the board (there are tokens of each player’s token to mark with). Only one player can occupy each space. As for trump cards, you can’t lead with a trump card unless you’ve declared 1 suit is gone from your hand. At that point, you’ll be able to play or lead with the trump card. Dan B. (3 plays):I like the idea a lot, and it’s worked well enough so far… but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s solvable in some sense, i.e. that with more experience a player with a certain hand distribution can dictate the outcome. But I could well be wrong. And it’s definitely better than dois, which I am much more certain has issues. The starting player will play a lead cat card and will declare what colour it is (not red at this point). They will then use one of their tokens to cover the colour / number option on the research board.

A round of Cat in the Box ends in one of two ways: either everyone plays down to their last card, or someone causes a paradox. What is usually a tense game full of “will I or won’t I” now because a head-to-head strategy game. It works, but it’s a different feel and doesn’t have the full circle of choices that comes with the 3, 4, or 5-player count. This bonus centers around the patterns players have created with their tokens on the central board. There’s no penalty for missing your bid, but if you hit it exactly, you’ll earn 1 extra point per token you have in your largest orthogonal grouping on the board. It’s this mini-game which drives the larger arc of the game and makes the game a treasure, and not simply a novelty. Cat in the Box adds additional structure to the available card distribution by fixing the play space to exactly one of each card in the distribution, such as 1 through 8 in each of four suits. It doesn’t do this perfectly, but puts the onus on you to make sure it works out. And if you mess it up – welcome to Paradox City! The hand ends, adversely for you, and closer to fine for the other players.Cat in the Box’s….box, that takes the bifurcated suits and ranks and corrals them, is what enables everything else to flourish: the grid placement, the short suit declarations, and the paradoxes.

With that being said, Cat in the Box is an incredible achievement. There is so much depth here. And like Schrödinger’s thought experiment, you think you have it down, and then in a blink of an eye, you don’t. When you feel you have a strategy, you observe a new possibility and hope to play again. On the off chance that your little experiment just might work. Speaking of player count, it is possible to play a 2-player variant of the game. But it’s very different from regular gameplay. With the way the number of cards vs. the number of board spaces works out, it is now elementary to avoid a paradox. I love the way the pressure to not cause a short-suit paradox in the late game leads to a single suit filling up in the early game; this makes it difficult to get intra-suit runs, like our 6/7/8 we were hoping for. This fear causes you to want to keep the sets (like the three 5s), but as we discussed, that strategy has its own risks. That’s all gone now, of course. Schrödinger’s Cat has been memeified enough that everyone knows the basics. You smile, open your mouth, say “Do any of you know about Schrö–“ and everyone shuts you down. The hoary old chestnuts simply don’t cut it anymore. This has left people like me in a difficult position. Now how are we to entertain people with advanced physics? If it becomes impossible for a player to play any of the cat cards from their hand because all of the numbers are taken then they must declare a paradox. This immediately ends the round. End Of Round

James Nathan (8 plays): I originally reviewed Cat in the Box on the blog in January 2022 and still love it. 🙂 How many players are playing Cat In The Box? This is the most important question at this point. Depending on the number of players you may need to exclude some of the cat cards. For a full game of five players you use all of the cards, if you have four players you exclude all of the 9 cards, three players you exclude the 7, 8 and 9 cards and for two players you exclude the 6, 7, 8 and 9 cards. This review is of the Deluxe Edition, which is what was released last year. It adds components for a fifth player, and it features nicer components. To my knowledge, the Deluxe Edition is also the only available edition: the first version is out of print. And then there is the paradox. What a cool concept to tie into the game. The impossibility to play a card results in time coming to an immediate stop (and the game). I haven’t equally been in awe and dread of a mechanic like this in a long time.