Even a fluff Knuza is good fun

 I recently saw a copy of Reiner Knizia's Cat Ass Trophy at a flea market. A gaming buddy talked me into picking it up and he made a good call there. It's not one of his greats but even a middle-of-the-road Knizia is a game that you'll keep playing.

The game consists of a deck of cards that has seven suits ranked one to eight. Each card has a cat up to some kind of silliness or mischief and that's as far as the theme goes. The art is more on the charming rather than cartoony end of the spectrum.

Deal out a hand of nine cards to everyone and then deal out a row of cards in the middle, the number depends on the number of players. You will have cards left over and they are out of the game until the next round. Your goal is to get an in-suit straight of five cards and five of a kind. Which means one of the cards in the straight will be also part of the five of a kind. Each turn, you swap a card from your hand with one from the row. If someone achieves the goal, they reveal their hand and the hand ends and you score.

(POST SCRIPT: We learned we’d been making a mistake in how we were playing Cat Ass Trophy. You don’t need a straight. You just need five of a suit and five of a rank. So we accidentally came up with a variant that I’m pretty sure is still balanced, just a lot nastier)

You can also knock, doing nothing with your hand. The first time someone knocks, nothing happens. The second time ANYone knocks, the hand ends and you score.

Like golf, you don't want to score points. If you have a run or a set, you won't score any points for those cards. For all the rest, you score each rank value once. So if you have one, two, three or four 7s. its always seven points. Play hands equal to players and lowest score wins.

Cat Ass Trophy is very simple. You However, it is still full of interesting/tough decisions and lots of tension. And, while all the player interactions are indirect, they also manage to be in-your-face at the same time.

The two elements that make Cat Ass Trophy engaging and fun (particularly if swearing at other players is part of your fun) is the fact some of the cards aren't going to be in play and the mechanic of knocking, You can be putting a hand together without knowing if it's even possible. And knocking keeps the game from stagnating, adds tension and gives players agency.

Knizia doesn't always design the most thematic games but his mechanics rarely disappoint. On paper, Lost Cities seems like dull fluff but, in practice, the game hooked enough of us to be considered a classic. He builds simple structures that end up having constantly branching, shifting decision trees.

Cat Ass Trophy isn't a game that I would have sought out but now that it's landed in my lap, i enjoy playing it.