Game Overview: Super Cats, or Feline Finger Fighting

My role as BGG news editor and database manager sometimes consists of me throwing games into the database with the expectation that we'll hear more about the game later — then the game vanishes from a publisher's schedule and you hear nothing about it because the game was small or not highly anticipated by a huge number of people.

Such was the case with Sentai Cats, a 3-6 player game that IELLO had announced as a late September 2017 release as part of its mini games line. The game design was credited to "Tokyo Boys", a group that consists of Antoine Bauza, Corentin Lebrat, Ludovic Maublanc, Nicolas Oury, and Théo Rivière, with the nickname coming from their fondness for visiting Japan and attending Tokyo Game Market.

As far as I know, the title never appeared in print, and now new French publisher GRRRE Games has released the title under the name Super Cats.

Moving into phase two

Game play is super simple: Players simultaneously throw a number of fingers from 0-5, and the person with the highest unique number of fingers visible receives a reward, with the lower numbers getting better rewards. Your goal in the first half of the game is to flip over your five "regular" cat cards to reveal their "super cat" incarnations.

The first player to do so fights Robo-Dog in the second half of the game, with everyone else working against this player. Players once again simultaneously throw 0-5 fingers each round, with the super player removing a number of cards from Robo-Dog equal to the number they threw — but only if no one else matched them. If they were matched by one or more players, then they must flip that number of cats back to their normal sides. If all the cats are normalized before all the cards are removed from Robo-Dog, that player loses the game and everyone else wins; otherwise, that single player wins.

I've played Super Cats five times on a review copy from distributor Blackrock Games, and the game is as straightforward as it sounds: Throw fingers with everyone else, then do it again, then keep doing it until you either win or lose. Believe it or not, I go into much more detail about the game in the video below: