Isle of Cats - Grant's Game Recs

This is a REALLY fun game.

This was a Kickstarter that really paid off for me. We love this game.

I will be the minority opinion. Other than being super cute, we found it to be rather "meh." It did two things which I find unforgivable.

1. You get the most points by doing the most boring thing - using your resources to pay for and play lessons. It's far more fun to buy and place tiles.

2. The coolest bits (the cat meeples) are barely used.

For a drafting game where you draft and pay for bonus scoring cards, we prefer Carnival of Monsters. There are so many pattern making games that we enjoy more.

ubarose wrote: 1. You get the most points by doing the most boring thing - using your resources to pay for and play lessons. It's far more fun to buy and place tiles.

I guess I don't see this as two separate things with one being more fun than the other. I really enjoyed kind of plotting out my scoring bonuses AND I enjoyed placing cats. I really found the lessons to be a breath of fresh air, giving me ownership of how I'm going to score points rather than shared scoring conditions.

Josh Look wrote:

ubarose wrote: 1. You get the most points by doing the most boring thing - using your resources to pay for and play lessons. It's far more fun to buy and place tiles.

I guess I don't see this as two separate things with one being more fun than the other. I really enjoyed kind of plotting out my scoring bonuses AND I enjoyed placing cats. I really found the lessons to be a breath of fresh air, giving me ownership of how I'm going to score points rather than shared scoring conditions.

It's very much a personal preference. Objectively it is good game. I don't hate it or anything. I'd play it if, when we have f2f game group again, someone suggested it. But personally, it just doesn't hold its own against a half dozen other games on my self that we find to be more fun. That's the down side of playing games for 20+ years and having a large collection. New stuff has to be extraordinary just to get an edge on old favorites. Good doesn't cut it anymore.

This is going on an off topic direction to some extent, but few games are important. That's not only true of new games, but the most old ones, too. They may be fun, but the fun extends only to the learning period. The important games are the ones that manage to overcome that. To the additional disadvantage of older games, the design is dated. I'm interested in older games, but absolutely NOT dated design. This makes the "good isn't good enough" argument nor worth chasing to me because it kind of ends up in a "why play any games at all?" sort of place.

The commitment to older games (read "Ameritrash games") like they're some sort of sacred text that should never ever be spoken poorly of or thrown out is the #1 reason why I don't post here anymore. Too much old guard attitude still. I get the feeling that nobody is actually excited about playing games anymore, they'd rather bitch and moan about there being too many new games, clutching their garbage FFG games from 15 years ago as if their behavior is actually admirable or constructive. I can't do that

Anyway, Isle of Cats...

Josh Look wrote: This is going on an off topic direction to some extent, but few games are important. That's not only true of new games, but the most old ones, too. They may be fun, but the fun extends only to the learning period. The important games are the ones that manage to overcome that. To the additional disadvantage of older games, the design is dated. I'm interested in older games, but absolutely NOT dated design. This makes the "good isn't good enough" argument nor worth chasing to me because it kind of ends up in a "why play any games at all?" sort of place.

The commitment to older games (read "Ameritrash games") like they're some sort of sacred text that should never ever be spoken poorly of or thrown out is the #1 reason why I don't post here anymore. Too much old guard attitude still. I get the feeling that nobody is actually excited about playing games anymore, they'd rather bitch and moan about there being too many new games, clutching their garbage FFG games from 15 years ago as if their behavior is actually admirable or constructive. I can't do that

Anyway, Isle of Cats...

I think you are projecting a bit on what other games we would prefer to play over Isle of Cats. The games that we would choose to pull out over Isle of Cats would include: Ingenious (2004), Blokus (2000), Sagrada (2017), Alhambra (2003), and Carnival of Monsters (2019). I acknowledge that the preference for Ingenious, Blokus and Alhambra is that we have been playing them together as a family for 15 years, and it is hard for any similar new game to compete with that kind of personal history.

I like playing new games. If I didn't I wouldn't have Sagrada and Carnival of Monsters on our shelves. It's just that I'm getting pickier about playing new games a second time, and even more selective about buying them.

I would be very surprised if you still have Isle of Cats on your shelf 5 years from now. I'm fairly certain we will still be playing Ingenious, Blokus, Alhambra, Sagrada and Carnival of Monsters.

I'm a big proponent of playing the games you love. There's so many good games out there, why waste time on a game you don't love just because it has hype?