The Cursed Cat 🐈⬛ | Solo Board Game PaRTy!!! 🎉
Transcript
Welcome and welcome back everybody. It's tabletopi here and in today's video we'll be doing a solo playthrough of the cursed cat. During the course of the playthrough, I'll give a tutorial about how the game is played and be sure you stick around for the end of the video where I share my thoughts about the game in general. Before we get started, a huge shout out to Buttonshy Games for sending us a preview copy to check out here today. And as always with preview copies, please note that any rules, components, etc. are subject to change for the final retail release. The Cursat will be coming to Kickstarter on August 11th. So, I'll put a link down in the description in case you want to check it out at that time. But without further ado, let's get started. So, here we have a solo game of the Cursed Cat set up and ready to play. Over the course of the game, we'll be attempting to shuffle all of these monsters into our portal since our feline friend let them out by accidentally casting a bunch of spells.
For setup, we'll start by placing out our lab spell book and portal room cards in that order. You'll then shuffle the spell deck and deal three spells face up. The backs of the spell cards will be monsters, which you will place out into columns based on your desired difficulty. Today, we'll be playing the normal or medium difficulty game with four monsters in the leftmost column, three in the middle, and one on the right. As you place out monsters, note that monsters do have to be from highest to lowest value in each row. So 5 4 3 7 6 in this case, 9 and 14. We would have to swap these two. So, the higher value one is on the left and then 12 is on its own. The rest of the cards will get placed with their spell side up into a draw pile. And for medium difficulty, we'll be discarding one of those cards off to the side. Each turn is going to be broken down into two phases: relocation and casting a spell. To relocate, you can take any monster from the top of any column and put it onto a new column following the size rule.
meaning it has to be played into either an empty slot or on top of a monster that is larger than it. So, this nine could go on the 12, but not vice versa. And any card could go on top of this portal. The second thing you'll do each turn is cast one of your spells. If you are able to successfully complete the requirements of the card, you'll discard it and your next turn will give you up to two relocations. But if you were unable to cast any of the provided spells, you'll still have to discard one and you will only be limited to one relocation in the next round. At any point, if all the monsters are lined up on top of the portal, you've won the game. But if we run out of spells in our spell slots and draw pile, we will have lost. One other important thing to note is that spells in these three slots do not refill. So if I cast, for example, pocket dimension, I will be limited to only using three spells for the rest of the game. And that's all we need to know to get started. So, for our first turn here, we're going to go ahead and see what spells we have. We have Titanic Clash, which lets us choose a monster sandwich directly between two adjacent monsters, either vertically or horizontally, and we discard it. Could be very helpful. We also have Cower, which is um destroying an odd-sized monster smaller than an oddsized monster above it. We currently could do that with the five. We have Pocket Dimension, which rotates and becomes a new room until it's empty and then it gets discarded. And then we have call fourth where we choose a monster in the middle of the column and move it to another column. Okay, so definitely we want to get this three out of here so we can start playing some of those larger sized ones. Could potentially
clear this up and use call forth to get the 14 over here, which is what I think we might want to do. Okay, so I have a plan. I think that if we I'm going to pull these down a little bit so we have more room on top. What we're going to do is relocate this nine over here and then the three at the very top of that. That is our first relocation. We get up to two. Now, we are going to use all fourth in order to choose a monster in the middle of its column, meaning it's not the top nor the bottom card, and we're going to relocate it to a different column. Since we successfully completed this spell, it gets discarded. These are going to slide down, and now we have two relocations to use. Again, if we can't successfully cast a spell, then we're limited to one in the next round. Now that we have the 14 here, ideally 12 would be next, but it might be challenging getting that over there. So, we could use Titanic Clash to get rid of it. Um, so I think what we'll do is we'll move the three over here and then the nine on top of the 14 since that's the next highest. But now this is not sandwiched between anything. So, I'm starting to rethink my thoughts about the matter. what we could do next. Or we could just leave the nine in lie of getting rid of this 12 first and then move it next round, which I think we will do. So, let's go ahead and get rid of Titanic Clash. And we choose a monster sandwich directly between two other monsters vertically or horizontally and discard it. So, we're going to get rid of this 12. This will slide down. Now, we have our two relocations for successful spell casting. So, we'll put the nine over
here. Now, the seven can go next. We've set ourselves up pretty well here, I think, in order to be able to get the rest of these smaller monsters over, but let's see. We can do oddsiz monsters if we put the three over there next time for power. Reflect is choose two monsters in the same row with a size difference of four or less and swap them. I'm not sure that that's particularly helpful. We can do pocket dimension just to get an extra room to play with and that way we still get our two relocates. So, I think we're fine there. Let's go ahead and do this three here. And now we'll move six up. And we'll use cower in order to discard the Oh, just kidding. It has to be lower. So, we can't use cower. So, I think what we'll do, we'll just back up.
Is we'll put the three here in the pocket dimension. And then we'll put six up here. Let's use probably not reflect cuz that doesn't quite help us. I mean, we can use it so that we get our two swaps. So, we'll swap this five and four. And now for our two relocates, we'll do So we have 9 14 7 6 5 4. We can use two of these if or one of these if we want. There's not really anything that's helpful for us. We can swap these two. Not that it matters, but we'll go ahead and do it anyway. And then we can relocate this three on top here. And we've won the game with one extra spell in our inventory. And that pocket dimension goes away. So there you have it. That is a playthrough of The Cursed Cat. This game is definitely very easy to pick up on and very quick to play once you kind of know what the cards do, which is something that I really appreciate. I think it's been a long time since I've had a solo game, even a micro game that has felt this quick and clean and streamlined that I can play in just a couple of minutes.
And I do really like the puzzle of trying to rearrange things. It kind of feels like that block stacking game, Tower of Hanoi type of mechanics, but with some card text, obviously more complexity than just an abstract kind of concept. I definitely found my first few playthroughs to be quite challenging. So, there's some variability based on which cards come out, which spells you get at what times, and there's definitely a level of strategy that I didn't pick up on that first play as far as how those relocation actions work. and you might just need to set yourself up in order to cast spells versus just trying to get everything into the portal as quickly as possible. So, even on the easy mode, the first couple of plays I did not do so well. Um, but I'm starting to get the hang of it and it's been an enjoyable process learning what the different spells do and how to manipulate the different monsters from play to play. So, overall, if you're looking for a very quick and concise solo game with streamlined rules and mechanics, I would definitely check out The Cursed Cat. It will be coming, like I said, to Kickstarter on August 11th.
So, there's that link down in the description if you want to check it out or sign up to get notified. And again, a huge thank you to Buttonshy Games for sending us a preview copy to check out here on the channel. But that's about all the time we have for today. Thank you all so much for being here. If you enjoyed the video or found it helpful, please feel free to give it a thumbs up and you can also subscribe for more solo and other board game content. Thanks as always for being here and we'll see you next time. Bye.