Speaking as someone who regularly plays games filled with questionable content, I’m not sure I’ve ever witnessed stakes quite as high as those in Frank West’s Race to the Raft. The Isle of Cats has caught fire and it’s your task to herd these disoriented kittens to safety. Because they are cats, they are the opposite of ruly. My nine-year-old is invested. So invested, in fact, that I have been prohibited from playing it without her.

Three kittens scramble to escape the wildfire.

Fortunately, Race to the Raft is just comedic enough to offset its perilous tone. This is a tile-laying game — a tile-laying game twice over — in which the cats are so dainty and regal that they studiously refuse to follow any route that doesn’t match the color of their socks. Mr. Green Cat will only walk on grass, the Forest Cat sticks to beds of fallen autumn leaves, and Aqua Cat prefers his toe beans moisturized, thank you very much.

The first level of this particular conundrum requires careful planning in order to create suitable catwalks for your felines. Cards come in a few varieties based on probability; there’s a deck that’s more likely to include purple terrain, another for grasslands, and so forth. Nothing is guaranteed, however, turning each round’s planning session into a minor gamble.

Once in hand, you’re free to layer cards over the map and other cards. You’re free to rotate them, even. But there are some strict limitations to consider as well. You can’t layer them over fire, nor over cats, nor hang them over the edge of the board. This doesn’t sound prohibitive. Within a few rounds, it becomes surprisingly difficult. Especially as your cats get closer to the raft and the flames close in, at which point you may find yourself backtracking or getting creative with your placements to squeeze the right tiles in.

It doesn’t help that you’re also spending cards to prod the cats into motion. There’s a big difference between the basic and advanced games. They’re divergent experiences in more ways than one, but the most immediate is that cats will move any number of spaces in an easier session but only five under the advanced rules. So there’s an element of rationing, too.

Oh, and this is one of those “no communication” games. Much of your time in Race to the Raft is spent in silence. There are special tokens that can be spent to briefly confer or, more humorously, to mew like a feline. When your vocabulary is limited to the three phrases “Yes,” “No,” and “Hell no, there’s fire coming,” even a meow can be expressive.

The art is lovely.

It isn’t enough to spread a pathway of cloaks for a kitten and then send it all the way home in one frantic sprint. This is thanks to the spreading fire. Race to the Raft is a game on the clock, but it’s as tangible a game counter as I’ve seen. After every laid tile — and after every four cards spent on movement — you’re forced to draw from a bag of fire tiles. Like the cards themselves, these represent a tile-laying puzzle of their own. Because the fire tiles are polyominoes, you can jigsaw them together to capitalize on the dead space left behind by your cats. Soon there are heated fingerlings between cats. Sometimes you’ll creep them forward just so you can slash and burn the landscape behind them. Every so often, a cat will be left with only the slightest window between flames. It’s all very harrowing.

Depending on the scenario, of which there are over eighty, your cats become even more delicate. Maybe the purple cat will only board the side of the raft farthest from his starting position. Maybe your cats need to arrive at the raft in a certain order, or all in the same turn. Eventually, you’ll meet a white cat that will only follow paved stones, special paths that are layered over the top of the other.

This last addition represents Race to the Raft at its best, transforming it into a puzzle with three interlocking layers: regular paths, cobbled paths, and the consuming fire nipping at your heels. With so much going on, it becomes increasingly possible that someone will make a crucial misstep. Even then, West provides the occasional rewind in the form of water tokens, which can remove any fire tile. But these are limited and chip away at your score, forcing everybody to carefully consider when and if to deploy them.

Fire placement is its own puzzle.

In a way, it hits an unexpected sweet spot. It’s more winnable than the sterner cooperative games out there, while still putting up a real challenge at the higher difficulty levels.

Strange as it might sound, the closest comparison is The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, Thomas Sing’s cooperative trick-taking game. Like The Crew, Race to the Raft is all about walking through its ample scenario booklet, tackling ever-greater challenges and adding little twists that upend what you’ve come to expect from previous successes. Some of these twists are direct recreations of Sing’s, although they’ve been adapted to fit the game’s geographic emphasis. Figuring out how you’ll get that dang purple cat to the raft before that dang yellow cat is one thing; figuring out how to pave the way for that darn white cat while tucking that darn green cat out of harm’s way, or learning how to use one darn cat to free another darn cat from peril — that’s where this game gets interesting. Much like The Crew, we found ourselves skipping over entire clusters of early scenarios as we chased a challenge.

Yet it never becomes unpleasant or stutters to a halt. That’s maybe the biggest takeaway. My nine-year-old is always on the cusp of figuring out tougher games, and it’s a delight to watch her grapple with advanced concepts and eventually master them. Race to the Raft captures that process in miniature. We’re asked to master something new each session, yet the rules never grow complicated enough that we have to pause to learn anything.

That darn white cat.

Perhaps its biggest limitation is that I can’t tell whether the game would be as worthwhile for a group of adults. Whenever I play, my nine-year-old emerges from the shadows to insist she take part. But as a game in mixed-age company, it continues to surprise. This is one of those wonderful puzzle games that functions across the age gap, offering a whole lot to explore without much in the way of rules load. It’s a delight.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

A complimentary copy was provided.