The Cursed Cat Kickstarter Preview Button Shy
Transcript
Welcome to where there's a will there's a way. I'm Ian, your friendly casual gamer. Today I'm here with a solo Kickstarter preview for The Cursed Cat by Scott Almes in the Simply Solo series from ButtonShy. This will be coming to us tomorrow in the summer collection along with Forest Rivals which Stacy and I previewed on the channel as well. You can look for that video and two other games. Let's get down table see how it plays. All right, so in The Cursed Cat, this mischievous cat has unlocked these has has performed this spell and unlocked monsters into your lab and you have to get them to the portal to um to get rid of them. So, what you have is you have your lab, your spell book, and your portal and those get set up like this. You have all of your spell cards as well as monster cards. These are the monsters that have come out because the cat performed a spell.
Um I love this I love the look of these with the with the pictures and the and the spell book. And on the back you have spells. So, what you're going to do is you are going to shuffle up the cards and place them spell side up to the left here. You're going to just deal the top three out. It doesn't really matter where they're they're just dealt out. You can put them closer together. They don't have to necessarily be under the rooms. Then we are going to deal monsters into each of these areas, the lab, the spell book, and the portal. And our goal, we're going to do we're going to play on easy today. So, you go from left to right.
The lab holds four, the spell book holds two. Ooh, that's a little high. I might need to adjust my camera here a little bit. Um it's a little bit high for being able to see what is going on. So, we're going to zoom out a little bit to uh to get so we can see that a little bit better. And then the last thing we need to do is we need to in every row, we need to um order these from greatest to least. So, this 10 needs to go here. Five needs to go here. The goal of the game is to get all of your monsters into a portal in a single column. Um and it's So, it's going to get kind of big. We may not be able to see it all. Um I'm thinking the spells will be gone and I can move everything down before that. So, on your turn, you can do you're going to do one of you're going to do two things possibly. You're going to relocate monsters and this 11 up top is not going to be good for me and I'll tell you why in a minute. And you do that by relocating up to two monsters from the top of a column to the top of another column, but you can only place them on bigger monsters. So, this is an 11 monster. He can't be placed on this three or the four. So, that one's going to be a little bit trouble for me.
Then you are required to perform a spell. So, you get two relocations every turn. Unless your spell fails. If you have a failed spell, then you go down to one relocation every turn. So, this I need to discard my top two cards. On easy mode, you discard two. In the rule current rules, it says from the top of the spell book column, but that would get rid of everything in this column. So, I'm not sure if it's from the spells or the spell book column. I was watching some other play-throughs and everybody was discarding them from the spells, but that doesn't seem to make it easier to me. I So, I don't know if I'm supposed to get rid of both of these, but I'm going to play it how everybody else did. Um and then we'll get clarification on that. So, right now, the only move I can make, and I'm going to do this for now, is to get this three here. I'm looking at my spells here. I have whirlwind. I can swap two columns of equal height. Like that one isn't going to work cuz I don't have any equal height. Reflect, choose two monsters in the same row with a size difference of four or less, swap their positions. So, I could swap some stuff around, which might help me here.
Betrayal, choose two monsters in the same row, discard the larger one and place the smaller one in its place. So, that might actually help. So, I think we're actually going to not move this one right now. We're not going to do a relocation. You don't have to relocate. And then you have your spell deck. So, I've got the spell deck here. Uh dark summons, choose the top monster of any column, discard that monster and place this spell in its place flipped to its size seven monster size side. So, this might help me here later on, but I am not going to relocate anything right now. I'm actually going to choose two monsters in the same row, discard the larger one and place the smaller one in its place. So, I'm going to discard I'm going to do these two.
I'm going to discard this 10. I'm going to So, I'm going to discard this over here. And I put the four in its place. Now, I have my portal completely open, which sets up a good move on my next turn. I'm going to take this 10 or this 11. I'm going to relocate it here. I'm going to take this Which one do I want to relocate? I want to I don't want to relocate. I'm going to just do one relocation. I'm going to use this dark summons. This dark summons card allows me to choose the top monster of any column. Discard that monster and place this spell in its place. Um and I think this is going to help me quite a bit. This one I want to get rid of this one. So, I'm going to discard this. I'm going to place this seven monster here. I'm going to move that there. Now, my next turn, I'm going to relocate this seven over here.
I'm going to relocate this five over here. Now, I have to use a spell. Um and let's see. 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 the spell. I like that. We're going to use this spell and we're going to make that a column because my next turn, I can relocate this three here to open up this six. Then, my next relocation is going to be this four. And yep, that's getting a little high, so let me zoom out a little bit here. Let me move this stuff down a little bit so you can see
a little bit better the top of that column. Okay. And I have a monster here still, so now I got to use a I need to use a um a spell. I can't swap two columns of an equal height. If your spell fails, you still put it in the discard pile, but what happens is you only get one relocation, which to me is actually fine. Um the game ends at any time if every monster is in the portal column. So, as soon as I get every monster in the portal column, I'm good. So, I'm going to use this. It's going to fail. I only get one relocation, but I only need one because I only need to get this three up here. So, I'm going to slide this down so you can see.
There is This is empty, so that is going to go there. So, you can see I got all of my monsters into my portal column. So, that's a win. So, there is the cursed cat. Um Okay, a couple things about this game. First of all, love the art. Um this is a prototype copy uh as far as things goes because it is coming to Kickstarter uh to on uh August 11th, which would be tomorrow from the day this is posted. Um I really This is interest- interesting puzzle. I've played it a few times. Uh couple times I one time I didn't couldn't get everything over. I ran out of spells. Uh next time I got it and this time I I got everything over to the portal. So, it is an interesting puzzle whichever spells come up versus which um monsters come up in which order and the fact that you have to put all of your bigger ones to the left to start and you need to get them to the right really gives it like, "Where am I going to move things?"
Sometimes you might need to use move backwards. But, you can see there's a lot of different spells. I love the art in these cards. Um these cards are really really cool. I love the style. Um Let me go back down. So, I love the style here with like the magic page and then the you can see the mist from the uh spell going around and then you have the really cool monsters. Really great artwork on this. Um does the rules here say who the artist is? Um Let's see. Art by An- Andrea Ivasic Vikai? I think that's what it says. It's a little hard to read. Um But, yeah. So, I really enjoy this one. This is one I'm definitely going to keep an eye on on the campaign. I love my Kickstarter games. I want to see what uh else it comes with. I want to see this rule in the rulebook to see um discarding cards from the actual spells seems to make it harder because I have less spells to use instead of easier.
But, discarding from the spellbook, yes, it makes it a lot easier cuz you have an empty column. But, then I'm wondering why you would even put them in the column. So, couple things to keep an eye on for that um and to get clarified on those things. But yeah, so there is the cursed cat from Buttonshy Games, uh Scott Almes' Simply Solo. Once again, this is Ben Where There's Wills, There's a Way. My name's Ian. I'll see you next time at the table.