Bezier Games: Cat in The Box Deluxe Edition

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Sometimes you’ll look at your hand and know you can risk short-suiting yourself early on, your hand providing enough flexibility to do that. In these first two examples, an unstated symptom is that there’s no lever controlling the distribution.

We have to talk about this for a minute before we can begin to understand Bezier Games’ Cat in the Box. This is a How To Play for this amazing Trick Taking game so if you want to learn the games rules without dipping too much into the actual rule book and youtube videos then this is the blog for you.Additionally, I try to avoid games where players who struggle might end up with negative points, as that can kind of sour players on a genre as a whole. Not only do you have to try to read your opponents' hands based on the way they're playing (watching the Experiment board certainly helps with this) but you have to be able to keep from cornering yourself so that you don't fall to a paradox, and also think about how much room to give your opponents so that they don't fall to one and end the round before you can reach the goals that you've set for yourself. We’ve had some three-player games where two of the four colours went like that before things really started getting interesting.

The wave does not collapse and the card is not restricted to a particular suit until it is played to the table. Even if nobody “cheats” by running out of a suit early, it’s still possible for there to be a paradox, and that’s because Cat in the Box sneakily included five of each number. I wanted to make a post to see if anyone else noticed this strategy, and what they would do to prevent/punish it.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 could be that you’re down to a 5 and a 7, but there are no places left to play them because the players kept all five of each in circulation.

So many find this topic utterly compelling because we still do not have a strong understanding of how any of this really works. If you cause a paradox, you’re almost certainly out of it (unless each player causes a paradox each, I guess). I have spent 1,500 words, the longest straight review of my Meeple Mountain career, talking about a small card game. When a hand is played to perfection, the bonuses from the contiguous area come flowing in, but if you’ve hit your bid well without managing the contiguous area in a similar manner, you likely would have been better off going for max amount of tricks. As always, someone on BGG got an answer, which is much appreciated, but it would have been nice to have them mentioned in the rulebook, even if they are just a vestigial set of cards so that players familiar with the old edition could use them in lieu of indicating their card’s observed color via their player board.The unwashed masses would be entertained for hours—hours, I swear—as you discussed the finer details of this particularly digestible paradox of quantum superposition.

Whoever causes it to happen will lose a point for each trick they’ve taken, and the other players will score normally. All that said, it’s still a game I’d be willing to play more, and appreciate even if I’m not so enamored of it as others. Red, by the way, is always the trump suit, but you can’t lead with it until somebody has played red while following.The only thing I can think of to punish this is by forcing a paradox based on their condemned color? It’s nice for tracking what cards have been played, but I think the most I’ve ever seen somebody score was 3, and that’s assuming they meet their prediction.