The Cursed Cat | Solo-Only Micro Card Game Playthrough and Tutorial (Prototype copy provided)
Transcript
In the new solo only micro card game, The Cursed Cat, you play as a witch or a wizard with a troublesome feline familiar. Your cursed cat somehow managed to summon all sorts of monsters into your laboratory. Now you must banish them all through a portal before you run out of magical spells. The Cursed Cat is the 11th game in the Simply Solo line by designer Scott Alms. The publisher, Buttonshy Games, plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign starting on August 11th as part of the Buttonshy Micro Games summer 2026 collection. Check out the link in the description below for more information. Setup for the Cursed Cat depends on your selected difficulty level. I'm playing on medium difficulty, so I dealt out four monsters into the lab, three to the spell book, and one to the portal. I then dealt out three spells and discarded one card from the top of the spell deck. To finish setup, we simply need to rearrange each row in descending order with the largest numbered card to the left.
And there we go. We are ready to begin playing. To win the game, all the monster cards need to be over in the portal column before we run out of magical spells. At the beginning of each of our turns, we may perform up to two relocations. A relocation is when you move a monster from the top of one column to the top of any other column. There's one rule. When you relocate a monster, you must place them on top of a higher numbered monster. So, for example, I couldn't place this seven on top of this one, but I could place the one on top of the seven or on top of the three. For my two relocations, I'm going to move this one onto the three and then the seven onto the 10.
Now that I've done my relocations, I must play one of my spell cards. I can play any of these four, including the top of the spell deck. I'm going to play call forth. It says to choose a monster that's in the middle of a column. And by middle, it means neither the top nor the bottom. I can then take that monster and move it to another column. So, I'm going to take this 15, which is in the middle, and move it over here. When performing these magical spells, you don't need to worry about placing, you know, higher monsters on lower monsters. That's just a restriction for when you're doing a relocation. So now I can discard that. And when there's a hole like this, you just slide things down to cover the hole. And crucially, I do not refill this card that I used. When I play from the top of the deck, then there'll be another card there. But when you play these other cards, this is just limiting your choices. There we go. That's the end of my first turn. Now we go to my second turn. And again, because I used a spell and I successfully used all of that spell, I get to do up to two relocations. If I were to play a spell and not use the effect because either I couldn't or I didn't want to, then I'd only get to do one relocation at most.
But my spell was successful, so I get up to two. I want to move this 14 onto the 15. And now I have to decide, you know, I can't get to the 10 right now. I could move the nine on top if there was some way for us to get rid of the 10. That's the decision I need to make. I think I will put the seven up there. Now I get to play another spell and I'm going to play reverse gravity. This says to reverse the size rule. In other words, do not relocate onto larger monsters. Place this spell next to the columns as a reminder. Then end its effect and discard it when you choose your next spell. Okay, so we'll just place this off to the side to remind us.
So now that's the end of our turn. We're going to our third turn. And this reverse gravity is in effect. So for my two relocations, I'm going to go nine, which will be on top of the seven. And I'm already running out of room here. I'll bring it around here just so just so just so just so just so just so just so we can see everything. So just know that nine's on top of that seven. So because the gravity's reversed, I place the larger on top of the smaller. And then for my second, I'm going to place the 10 on top of the nine. After I do that, reverse gravity goes away. And now I've got to play one of these. I'm going to play whirlwind. It says swap two columns of equal height. I don't have two columns of equal height. So that means I failed to do that spell. That means I only get one relocation this time. But that's fine because I want to place this eight onto that 10.
We're back to normal gravity. So I had to place a smaller onto a larger. And there we go. We've managed to move all of the monsters onto the portal. They all get banished out of the laboratory. And we've won the game. We still have two spell cards remaining. So there you go. That was a win on medium difficulty. How about we try hard difficulty and see if we can win that. On hard difficulty, we're going to do five cards in the lab, three cards on the spell book, and one card on the portal. Oops.
We deal out three. And in the hard game, you don't discard one card off the top. That's in order. We got to swap those. And that's it. Okay. Before we do our relocations, let's look at our spell cards. That might help us decide what we want to do. So, we have reverse gravity. Again, that's super useful. Here we have pocket dimension. Rotate this spell and place it as a new room with space for a column above it. If the column is emptied after a monster leaves it, discard this spell. So, this just gives us a whole another column to work with. That's really, really good.
Levitate is choose a column with two or more monsters. Move that monster's bottom monster to the top. Well, boy, that would be super useful here to get that 14 to the top or even to get this 11 to the top. And then there's bind. It says, "Choose two vertically adjacent monsters. Move them to another column as if they were a single monster. You must follow the size rule using the sum of their sizes. After the move, treat them as two monsters once again." Okay, so we could move like this four and this one as a pair and treat that as a five. So using that bind, we could actually move these two over there. I have kind of a wild idea.
Well, yeah, I think this seems like the easiest thing to do. So for my two relocations, I'm going to move the four here on top of the eight and the one on top of the four. Simple enough. And then let's go ahead and play reverse gravity. Now because of the reverse gravity I can go nine and 11.
Now the reverse gravity goes away. And for my spell card, I think I want to levitate this 14. So we're going to move it to the top. Okay. So now I'm choose I'm choosing not to do a relocation. So I'm going to go straight to playing and I'm going to play bind. So we're going to move these two together and we're going to move them into this empty column.
Now for my relocation, I want to put this six on top of the 14. That's all I want to do. And we'll then use Titanic Clash. Choose a monster sandwiched directly between two adjacent monsters, vertically or horizontally. Oh, right. Actually, vertically or horizontally. So, I'll just leave that there. Actually, that would be even better because we can use that horizontal and crush it and it just goes away.
Beautiful. I can now move the seven on top of the 11 and the six on top of the seven. I can do pocket dimension here, but it won't really matter. We'll make this the pocket dimension. And then I'll relocate. Bam. That easy. And there we go. We only had one card left, but we did it. So, there you have it. That is how you play the cursed cat. I'd like to thank all the financial supporters of Totally Tabled, including the totally radical Jeff Fitz Simmons, Hextra, John Kohler, Scott Meyers, Kevin Qualls, and Jay Satwite, as well as the totally bodacious Lancelot CNS. If you're interested in becoming a member, you can join on my YouTube or my Patreon at www.patreon.com/totabled.
You'll gain access to my new exclusive podcast, Tablet Talk, as well as unboxing videos and whatever extra stuff I come up with. As always, thank you so much for watching and goodbye.