What's APPening - The Isle of Cats

Heat. Heat. [music] Hi everybody. Welcome back to What's Happening. My name is Z Garcia. Today I'mma be uh laying out some cats on on the deck of a ship. I will be scoring points off of those cats and generally um loving cats. The I the I love cats. That's what I this game is really called. All right.

Monica says raft. I call it a boat. Uh let's see. We've got all the usual suspects in here. Makes me so happy to see all of you. Hi everybody. Hope you're having a great day. Thanks for joining me today. Uh I'm going to play a game I've never played before. This um physical game, the olive cats, the tile laying polyomino game, is one that just passed me by.

I've never played it. I've heard I would enjoy it. I think Mr. Mike Delissio recently mentioned it in his top 100 and I thought I should finally check this game out. and and by gosh I am going to in an app. So we are going to go ahead and jump into it. Race to the raft. Oh yeah, that's another game from the same company in the same it's in the the aisle of cats universe.

The cinematic aisle of cats universe. We're going to play local play here versus AI. It's going to be me. And how much AI do I want? Maybe three players with two AI. What does that mean? I don't know. Oh, that means it just Yeah. All right, let's do that. I'm going to be I want to be the turtle. Yeah.

And I want to be orange. That looks like yellow to me, but we'll call that orange. Okay, there we go. That's going to be me. Let's do it. I will talk you through it a little bit as we are going in case you have not played the game so that you know what's going on. The objective of the game is to get the most victory points.

I'm going to be doing that by drafting cards and then using those things I drafted to gather cats and then putting those cats on the deck of the ship trying to fill in shapes with Tetris pieces. [music] if you would. So, here's what I got. I got a hand of cards. I'm going to be keeping two of these and passing them along.

Getting a new hand of cards from my neighbor. Keeping two of those were drafting cards. They come in a few different types. The green ones here are going to give me two things. They give me baskets, or in this case, half a basket. And baskets let me rescue cats, freaky alien looking cats. And then the boots at the bottom is my speed.

The higher combination of speed I have, the earlier I go. That's green cards. Blue cards here are going to be lessons they call them. These are objectives. In this case, a public objective. Everyone can go for this. Pick a color. I pick the color. Uh if I keep the card and then all the players are going to get two points for each cat of the chosen color touching the edge of the boat.

Fine. Yellow cards are going to be treasure. take any two small treasures or pay one fish to take any two common treasures. And these help me fill in those rooms on the boat. And then over here, we've got an anytime card. This is like a special ability. I play this any old time. Place your next cat or treasure anywhere on the boat, whereas normally they have to go adjacent to something I've previously placed.

The first one of course can go anywhere. All right. So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to pick that card and I'm going to pick that card. We're going to go nice and simple here. There we go. We confirm this. I pass all these cards. I get a new hand. We take a look at this one. Um, this one over here is a lesson for just me.

I'm going to probably take that. It says I get nine points if I have exactly five red cats on my boat. Uh so I would like to take that one. And then for the other one, um I'll take a freaky green cat over here. Again, this card and this card are are identical. Okay, they give me half a basket, one speed, half a basket, one speed.

They are the same. It's just the artwork that's different. So, I'll go ahead and take one of those. Pick it. Pass. I get to see the three cards my neighbors passing to me. Let's take a look. I am going to This is an anytime card. I gain one fish for each common treasure on my boat. I'll talk about fish in one second.

And this is one fish for each unique colored cat on my boat. Um, okay. So, here's the thing with the fish. Fish are the currency in the game. As in real life, I'm going to be spending fish to acquire these cards. Right now, my hand, if I play, and if I chose to keep every card I've got down here, would cost me six fish.

I have 20. But then I'm also spending fish to grab these cats from the island, wrangle them, and throw them on my ship. Probably in a less violent way. But I have to pay for the cats. I have to maybe lure the cats with fish. That's what's going on. That's thematically what's going on all of a sudden.

Uh so I want to be careful with my economy is the point. I'm going to go ahead and I'll gain that one. I'm going to pick that one and maybe I'll pick that one. I'll confirm that I pass the last one. I get the last one. That's it. Now, here's the thing. I do not have to keep all these cards I drafted.

If I think I'm spending too many fish, if I'm not liking one of these for one reason or another, I don't have to keep them. And in fact, I am going to let that go because I've got, if you look at the baskets I've got right now, I've got one full basket. This card here is a full basket. And then this one and its neighbor are another full basket.

So, I'm going to stick with those. I am going to let this public lesson go as well. I'm happy with that. I'm going to be paying 10 fish for the five cards across the bottle. Confirm. Everyone's doing this simultaneously. The private lessons get automatically played. Basically, it's you're you're hiding those from the other players.

The public lessons are public. They're over here. Feral friend. All players get three points per lonely red cat on their boat. What's a lonely cat? Well, it tells you right below that a lonely cat is a cat that can't get no love. It's also a cat that is not touching any other cats of the same color.

Well, why would I want the cats to be touching uh more cats of the same color? Well, for scoring, if you go over here, you'll see the scoring. Every rat on my ship that is visible at the end of the game is going to cost me points. Every room I have not completely filled is going to cost me points. Five in that case.

Um, rare treasures will be worth something. Cat families will be worth something. And then my lessons and the public lessons. Families uh means cats of the same color touching on my the deck of my ship. So, if I can get three red cats, let's say, together, that's eight points. If I can get six red cats together, that's 20.

Lonely red cats are now actually worth something. Do I want to do that and give up on the families? That's up to me. Uh, which cards do I want to play? I'm going to play all of these cards, actually. Play that. That gives me a number of baskets and a number of boots, which is my speed. You always have one basket anyway.

I have two more. That means I have three baskets. What are they for? For gathering those cats. I can take one cat per basket. I'm going to buy the cats from this display right here. And the ones on the left hand side cost me three fish. The ones on the right hand side cost me five. I would have to buy, if I intend to use all three of my baskets, they would all have to come from the cheap side.

They might not all I might not be able to get three. So, we'll see. But I definitely want to get me some red cats. That's happening. So, let's do that first and foremost. I'm going to grab this red cat right here. He can go anywhere I want. Um, where do I want to put this filthy cat? I'm going to put him at the front right here.

No, not like that. No, that doesn't work for me. That doesn't work for me. I wanted him to kind of be like a I'm on top of the world kind of cat. See, I'm the king of the world. He's on the front of the ship, you know. Every night in my dreams I meow I but it's not going to work out for him. So he's going to go right there.

Uh what is this? This is a gain a fish for each unique color cat on my boat. I'm not playing that. So I'm going to pass on playing. My opponents are going to go. They're going to do things. They're going to take [music] cats. Leave that red cat. Dang it. Somebody took my red cat. You animals. You filthy animals.

That's no good. I hate it. All right. What happens if I do this? Yeah, I'm okay with that. That's okay. I'm going to buy that cat. And I'm still passing on, I think. That would be two fish. It just gets me exactly back what I paid. That sucks. I'm going to pass on that. All right, that's me. I got some cats.

Here's the question. Now, I don't think I'm working towards getting big groups quite yet. So, I'm going to take this guy. He doesn't match the other dudes, but that's that's good. Actually, I'm going to spin this and I'm going to start covering these rats. So, here's the thing. You'll also notice on the board, but there's rooms, like I said, um in those rooms, you're seeing rats.

Like, you know, there's a couple of rats here beneath my tile. There's a bunch of rats over here, but there's also a green map. You see that green map right there next to those rats? If I cover that with a green cat, green map, green cat, that's a good thing. I'm going to get some some treasure. I take a common treasure, which is one of these up at the top.

What kind of treasure do I want? What kind of treasure do I want? I would love to put Ah, no. No. This sucks. I may maybe This is maybe not the best idea, but I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I've never played this game before. I'm doing it. There we go. I did the thing. My turn again. No, that's it. Okay, second round.

We put on some new tiles. We're going to draft new cards. That's it. You just saw me play one fifth of this game. David says, "The app seems like a good implementation." Indeed, it is a good implementation. I got to I went through the tutorial. Actually, I didn't even finish the whole tutorial. It's so easy.

It makes sense. They do a great job explaining it. Um, I also watched Tom Vassel. You might have heard of him. He did a video review and I watched the overview of that and uh, yeah, that helped. So, I did that and I did the the tutorial in here so I figured it out. But the app is very very clean. Really gets uh the way everything works across in a straightforward manner.

Plus, I love that I can hide what I'm looking at and then look at the board, decide what I want to do, bring that back. There is you have to select to accept your choice so you can't misclick on things. I like all of that. Okay, I really like this. That's pretty cool. I want to pick that. And I kind of dig that one.

I want that, too. Let's go. All right. But I am going to need some cats at some point. So, I'm going to go ahead and grab this cat. And sure, I'll grab that one. I'm gonna Interesting. Discard any two played lessons cards to gain one permanent box. That's an interesting card. One point per lonely cat on your boat.

I'll select that one. And I'll select that one. Let's go with that. And then let's see what I get at the end here. Okay. Jump in to play an anytime card before accessing discoveries. No, I'm okay. Oh, did it just move along? I guess I had to select that quickly. I don't want that many things for sure.

So, I'm going to I don't want to spend that much is my point. Uh you'll notice you carry over your fish and you get 20 new one. uh 20 income every round. I don't know if I'm going to try for that. I probably won't. Don't care for that one. And then take any two or common. I'll just do one of the two.

There we go. Confirm that. Uh I will decline on that. All right. So this one, yes. And this one. Yes. I am first. Very nice. I have 13 fish and I have three cats. Sorry, three rescues. So, let's do that. Let's um rescue some cats. My objective is still the only one I have is having exactly five red.

So, I'm going to do this fella right here. Boop. I'll spin this. I'm going to put him next to the other red cat. And I will mark that as accepted. Pass. That jerk took my red cat. These are all terrible, terrible choices. Terrible choices. Wow. No, no. Um, I could take this fella here. I could put him there.

That's not a bad placement. Yeah, let's rock and roll with that. Be careful. You won't get a treasure because I'm covering it with the wrong color. That's okay. That's okay. But then I'm going to have to do that at some point. All right, pass. I'm going to take this fella. I'm going to cover up some uh some rats there.

There we go. I am done. [laughter] Uh I will draw two cards. Sure, I'll draw two cards now. Might as well. Let's see. That's good. And then 15 points if you have three or more cats of each color. Wow. Sure. Yes, that's fine. If you draw a lesson card outside of the explore phase, you play during the next read lessons phase.

No problem. Doesn't matter. Rare finds. Your turn. I'm going to do this phase where I play this card here. What do I want to do? I'll take this one and I'll put it Whoops. I'll put it there. And then I'll take another basic. Might as well do a larger one because why not? And I'll put it there. Yeah, let's put it right there.

Whoop. And that means I've completed the room there. You want to again, you want to cover up an entire room because if you don't, then you lose points for that. And if you touch and hold on the screen, it shows you what a full room is. That's the dining room. This is your bedroom. And so on. Here we go.

New drafting phase. Oh, this is a fancy cat. Look at him. You get specifically that cat, but it's but it's kind of terrifying. No. Discard any two. Oh yeah, I've seen that. Seen that before. I'll pick that one. And this one just lets me go quite fast. I will do that. Half a basket might work. Let's see.

Let's see what's going to happen here. One point for every private lesson. Draw three cards. Move to three cats. Move up to three cats to different fields. The fields are the two sides of the beach. Oh. Oh, okay. Wow. That's interesting. I'd like the idea of drawing more cards. I'll take that. And maybe this one, though.

I'm not sure. I'll keep it. Confirm. And then over here, I'm going to take this guy who's half a basket. I want that. Take four tiles from the bag at random and immediately place them in the fields. Maybe confirm that and then I get this one. Okie do. There's several of these. I don't think I'll be Yes.

I'm going to jump in and I'm going to play that one cuz why not? All right. Which ones do I not want? I don't care for that one. I don't care for that one. I think I'm good with the rest. There we go. I'm going to jump in here and play this, which lets me draw three cards. Let's see what I got. Discard one permanent basket.

Gain three. Definitely don't want to do that. And Maybe that one. Let's go with that. Unfortunately, for for Volulta there, hi for Volulta, by the way. You're saying that you're uh you're sad that you can't get the Omniverse series except Onerim. Onim is not really available anymore. I I believe like Monica is saying, if you deleted it or changed devices, I don't think you have it anymore.

All right, let's take a look at which ones I want to play here. That's a half basket. Half basket. Half basket. How do I want to do this? I'll play this half basket. I'm going to play this half basket. I have two baskets now. And I'll play that one. I'm good. I'll keep the rest. I don't think I'll rescue more than three cats.

Maybe. Let's confirm that I'm still the fastest, which is kind of interesting. All right, I'm taking a red cat because absolutely I'm taking a red cat. I'm going to take this one. I am going to do that. I'm going to play that there. Make a family of the red cats. Boom. One, two, three so far. And I need five of those.

It's Felipe. Hello, Felipe. Thank you for joining me today, by the way. Who took my red cat? If I find you, if I find you, I'm gonna flip this and then reverse it like that and then put it right there. Yes. Yes. You're a good cat. There we go. All right. Yeah, I had the same thing happen to me on my phone.

I think on my phone. I think I lost it on my phone, but I still have it on my iPad. Yeah, the other one that I lost was the Rising Five is also gone now. You can play through the website, but the the app itself is gone. And that one breaks my heart, too. All right. What am I doing? So a purple cat. If I cover the purple cat, if I cover that space there, can I do that?

Yeah. So if I grab this fella and I do this, then I will get the treasure there. And I might as well do that because why not? Okay, players are taking the special stuff now. I don't have any of those cards. And now we go to round four. And again, it's five rounds, then the game is over. pretty quick.

Plays in a nice clip on the on the iPad here, but not too fast that I don't know what's happening. Sometimes you play these app implementations and they just give me whiplash. They take me from one screen to the next. They don't explain why they're moving on from one thing to the next. Sometimes it's just a little too much.

And this one I haven't seen get to obviously I haven't seen the scoring yet. I'm not there yet. But sometimes also when you're finished the game, they're like, "Here's who won anyway. Moving on. Go to the menu." And there's no just don't get any flourish. There's no satisfaction to that seeing who won the game and enjoying that momentary tension of the reveal the the the the you know the the I don't know just a little bit of that interest of seeing what who did the best and and where those points came from and all of that stuff.

So we'll see what it does with that. But but so far, I think the cadence of the app and the implementation is very good. All right, let's take a look. So, this one's interesting. 12 points if both captain's rooms are full. I have to go back and look. The captain's rooms are That's a captain's room. And then the front of the ship is the other one.

Can I get there? I might be able to do that. Now, this is fascinating. Two points per visible rat on your boat. So, you're really taking every rat from a negative one to a positive one. That might be worthwhile, especially if I am going for the 12 points for the captain rooms. I think I'm going to do that.

I think I'm going to pick this one and this one. I like it. Plus, didn't I keep a card over here? Um, this is not going to happen. Um, hard worker is for every private lesson you have. So, that'll be good for that, too. These are both private lessons. Yes. Okie dokie. Well, I better get some actual drafting.

And this is pretty good. Place your next cat or treasure anywhere on your boat. That could certainly help me start completing that captain's room. Gain one fish for every private lesson you have in play is also quite good. There's a lot of good stuff. That's a lot of good stuff. I'm going to take that one.

All right. All right. I'm going to take that one. And I'm gonna These are the same. That one. Okay, which ones do I not care for? When you next rescue one cat, you may rescue two cats instead. For each cat you rescue, you may use a basket. You must use a basket and pay the fish cost. Not with 13 fish.

I don't Doesn't really matter too too much. I'm going to let that go. I'm going to let that go. Oh, I don't think I care about the speed too much. Let's go with that. Yeah, let's go with that. Close this. All right. The Loki rat strategy. [laughter] Splendor was delisted. I did not know that. Well, that's amazing.

Which Mike uh Heler, which game are you talking about that you had a big storage box for it and it it didn't come out too much? You talking about this game? All right, let me take a look here. One basket half. One basket half. I am going to play them all. confirm that aisle of cats. Okay. Yeah, I could see that.

This is the kind of game I don't I'm enjoying this right now. I think if you start giving me a whole bunch of stuff, a bunch of extras, a bunch of modules, a bunch of different ways to tackle this, this can easily become the kind of game that stays in the box, for lack of a better term. It has that feeling of this is good.

Don't overdo it. It falls right into the the same basket, no pun intended, as uh Sagrada. I feel the same way about any of those games that are very pleasant. They do what they do well, but then they attain a level of success that demands more stuff and then it's too much. Janet, for most people, you know, for like 95% of people, suddenly that's too much now.

And the temptation's there, but once you have it, it stops coming out. You bring duel down with you next time you're down here. All right, sounds good. I'll check out the duel of cats with you. H. All right, I'm going to play this. I'm going to grab this nerd. I'm going to put him right there. Bam. I'm going to grab this one.

I'm going to put it there. Bam. I got to complete that room. I have to complete that room. I also need to remember I need some red cats. What am I going to do? This is a stupid shape. Oh, this sucks. I don't want that. I hate you, cat. So stupid. Oh, it's so stupid. I can't think of a better thing. Maybe that.

I mean, I'm wasting. That could work, right? Yeah, let's do that. Oh, no. They want exactly five cats. Crap. I still need one more red cat. Well, there's a red cat right there, but I'm not going to be able to complete that room. All right. So, this should now be on. Bam. There we go. I got nine points from that.

I'm done. Unfortunately, I'm going to pass. No. No. Um, I'll take this guy and I'll put him there. I have I need one little square. I need one little square right there. How do I do that? Oh, that wasn't the final round. I have one more round. Oh, I was terrified. Okay, never mind. The new boats are cool.

Something easy to toss in. Okay, I can see that. All right, so I'm pretty good here. Take any mu. I want that. I want the small treasure so I can fill in that one spot. I don't know how many treasures I have, so this might be worthwhile. So, nine points if you have exactly five treasures. One, two, three, four, five already.

Crap. Well, that's no good. Cuz I'm definitely going to take at least one more if I want to complete that. So, okay, I'll let that go. And then, when you next rescue a cat, rescue two. Gain two for each of those. I'll take this one. No, not that one. Uh, this one. There we go. Oh, it's just kitty cats.

Take this fella. And I'll take uh [sighs] the half a basket. Free half a basket. Pick a color. All players get one point per treasure touching the chosen color cat. Interesting. Yellow is two. Red one, two. That's actually worth it to me, I think. Good stuff. Definitely don't care for that. I'll keep that.

I'm really dropping down in my fish count. Do I have any cards I'm carrying over? No. Um, I'm going to let one of these two go and I think I'm good with the rest. I will confirm that. I'm going to be getting three cats. I'm good with it. Pick a color. The color is going to be red. I'm going to play all of these.

That happens later. Okay, I will confirm that. I do not want any more red cats. I want to make sure I don't have any more red cats. All claws means three or more of each color. And then noisy paws is going to happen in a moment. Okay, fine. Three of each color. Three or more of each color. Okay, so let me take a look here.

Green's good. Red's good. Yellow, I would need two more in yellow. And I would need two more in purple. That's very unlikely to happen. Very, very unlikely. But that doesn't mean I can't try to create some families. Though, a family has to be at least three. I'm going to take this guy here. I'll spin him like that.

And I'll stick him in there next to that other purple. Boop. Yes. Let's go with that. That's me again. I'll take this one. I'm going to put that one there. And I will accept. Now, there's a family of purple dudes right there. For my last thing, I just want to cover up some rats. I'm going to cover up these three rats right here.

So, I don't really care what it is. Can I do it with this fella? Well, I can cover two of them and get a bigger bonus. So, yeah, I'll do that. That cat is doing some some strange things. You're doing strange things, cat. I'm going to play this. I got two small treasures. Sorry, I'm too zoomed in. I apologize.

And I'm going to take this one. It's going to go there. Bam. I just made some points for hard worker. Was it? No, that one. Yes. And then I'm going to take the other little one and it's going to go there, I guess. Yeah, why not, right? Is anything else better than that? Not really. I'm not going to complete any more rooms.

There we go. I think I did pretty well for my first game, I think. Let's see how it all shakes out. Everybody's grabbing their last minute, you know, treasures and and fancy cats here. All right. All right. Man, they had a lot of cards. Just showing off now. Good night. All right. Okay. Oh, I didn't even realize the other people's ships were there.

Oh my goodness. Here we go. Let's see how we did. Oh, I like this. Oh, this is dramatic. Yes. O, empty rooms. Okay, good. That's must be public treasures. How did I do with the rats? Okay. Goodness. Oh, I suck. I got third place. How? What? I thought I was doing well. What happened? What? This person got 74 points from their bonuses.

74 points. All right, man. That's Yeah, I rescued a bunch of cats. Sure, but who cares if I didn't win? I'm all about the glory. I don't actually want to help the cats. I want the attention that rescuing cats gets me. I want that clout, that online clout. [laughter] That's difficult. That is a rough game, Monica.

I I felt that one. The cat scratch fever is what I got now. Well, there we go, folks. I enjoyed that. That was fun. That's a good game. Shenanigans is right, David. Shenanigans is right. I want a count by a a point by breakdown of everything they did. Show me the algorithm. I don't believe it. Mike says, "Yeah, if you can't fill your rooms or cover the cats, you get the you get the lessons that make up the difference." Yep.

Yep. Absolutely. Well, thanks team on. Thank you for tuning in. Uh and thank the rest of you for tuning in and checking this out with me. I appreciate it guys. This was fun. This was uh this was neat. I enjoyed that very very much. Great implementation. Interesting game. I don't know if I would want to play on the table.

I got to tell you, but I like the app quite a bit. I feel like the table might um I don't know, just kind of be a little bit messier, but I enjoy the app and it's a good it's a it's a lengthy excursion of a game that's almost an an actual hour of play time, whereas most app implementations are so fast because they speed up everything.

This one still that still felt like a whole meal. it didn't just feel like a little filler, you know. So, there you go everybody. I'm going to get out of here, folks. Make sure you keep it here on the Dice Tower for everything else we've got coming at you in uh the rest of the week. We've got uh crowd surfing, of course.

There's going to be a top 10 this week. What else is happening? There's so many things happening. There's so many things happening, folks. Reviews, of course, coming at you later this week and everything else we do. Thank you for tuning in and checking it out. My name is Z Garcia. Everybody, you're the best.

I'll see you on the next one. Take care. [music] Hey, uh, thanks for watching another video here on the Dice Tower. Uh, we really appreciate you stopping by and checking our things out. Thanks so much for joining us today. And hey, if you really like what we're doing here at the Dice Tower, then there are different ways to support the Dice Tower.

One of those ways is through Patreon. We have links in the description [music] to this video and we have links to lots of other things we do down there. So, definitely check it out. But either way, we're glad you watched us. Tell your friends about the Dice Tower. Until next time though, I'm Tom Vassel and I hope you enjoyed this video.