Isle of Cats – Does It Work With Five?

Setting out the boats and everything else took a few minutes and after each player had been dealt their cards, I explained the different types by showing examples from the deck, when they could be played, paying for them etc. I like to understand game rules, and I forget that others don’t like to know the full rules before they play and like to get stuck in, expecting me to pick them up when they try to break rules so after some abuse, we stuck in.

Choosing cards – when there are more than 3 players, you won’t see a card from your starting 7 again, so while it’s useful to remember what you passed on, the more players there are the less important it is to be thinking about what you might get back from your original hand, so I didn’t bother trying. In a 2 or 3 player game you know you will get at least 1 of your starting cards back, and that can change what cards you keep when passed from the player to your side, and maybe what you pass on. You get to choose 7 cards from a total of 16 through this phase, so whilst there is an element of chance in what you get dealt (and handed), there is that bit of strategy too - especially those first few lesson cards and those first few times you pass cards onwards. Those first two cards can set your strategy for this and sometimes later rounds and help fill your boat more efficiently. It could be worth getting a permanent basket as you will not have to buy each round; but you lose the boots that come with some basket cards – although you must remember that with each permanent basket you get, it will still cost 3 or 5 fish to fill it. On the last round I had 4 permanent baskets, so I needed between 12-20 fish to catch the cats, and as permanent baskets are expensive, I lost out as I only had 18 fish and there were no cats in the cheap seats after 2 rounds of catching them. I got caught out by other players using their anytime “catch another cat” card before my go and emptying the cheap field. As I had played other cards with boots that also had baskets, I had basically wasted the fish and treasures I gave up for a permanent basket, and this meant I didn’t fill a couple of rooms so lost me even more points. I regretted buying that permanent basket in round 3!

I was passed an Oshax first time on the first round, and I’d already kept the one I was dealt so I had 2 already and a permanent basket – I thought I was off to a great start. Oshax are efficient as you don’t pay for taking them from the field or use a basket (permanent or bought). Their other advantage is they can be any chosen colour and if you get 3 together, they count as a family (of Oshax) as well. Because the others were so keen to get stuck in, I hadn’t been able to explain what exactly Oshax did until after I was passed one. I never got passed an Oshax again though. And yes, I did offer the cat back.

Rescuing cats – working out the baskets was easy, working out speed (and player order) proved more problematic early on as the temptation to play everything yellow was too hard to resist for some. Advice was offered and although there was less waste of speed cards in later rounds, many were used even after it was clear that on the last round from the lesson I had played, if you weren’t top cat you’d lose points - which proved to be true for the other 4! Because I was sat at the end, only 2 players could easily see what I had in front of me.

Player order – this took some getting used to for the new players, understanding that it’s not first player then clockwise, but based on the speed on the cards you played, and that you don’t (shouldn’t) play all your cards with speed on the turn you get them. I found that with the number of cats in each field (by luck we were using 10 cats each side) that I didn’t need to really worry about being first or high up the order in the early rounds, so I tended to ignore any speed only cards – until I played the public lesson that punishes you if you are not top cat! Ging first though doesn’t always mean you get what you want as I found out with the anytime card used by another payer on the last round.

Public lessons - This is one of the fun elements of the game, some lessons only reward one player (hopefully you, like the top cat one) or punish the others, for example if you have too many fish at the end of the game. Watching how others play can give you an advantage when choosing lessons. I find that too many lessons reward others equally as well as you, so I tend to not choose many of these to play. Also, in this 5-player game it was not easy to see what was on the other end of the table. Maybe a round table would have resolved this problem – and being able to see what others were putting on their boat. I wasn’t too worried by what cats were on the other boats as I had already chosen my strategy based on my private lessons. In fact, I don’t think anyone was really bothered too much by what others were doing - that may be due to inexperience.

Filling rooms – some players placed their first cat in the bow or stern areas, others more midships. I was expecting better room filling if you started somewhere in the middle and spread out both ways – in the end it didn’t make much difference. Everyone’s first cat went onto the matching map space, so a common treasure was claimed by all on round 1. We all became adroit at using the common treasures efficiently to fill those awkward spaces, and we also managed to not get too worried about gaps on deck (our house rule currently ignores the deck as a room as we’ve never been able to fill the whole boat so everyone loses 5 points for that room anyway) – we all concentrated on placing our cats in marked rooms and catching rats. Well, all of us except the player who had the private lesson that gave more points for visible rats than you lost. It took us a moment to get that – it seems so counter to what the scoring indicates.

Running out of room - One of the new players played lots of public lessons which took up a lot of table space although it worked out quite well when scoring; however, they lost lots of points because she had lots of unfilled rooms. As the bag emptied, more rare treasures came out, so by the end of the 3rd round it was quite cluttered under the island. The common treasures were neatly laid out at the start – lasted about 2 rounds and they were scattered about. Space was becoming a premium, and dealing cards had to be done carefully so as not to disturb cats on the boats – still found room for the snacks though.