As much as I appreciated the spatial puzzle of Race to the Raft, Frank West’s follow-up to The Isle of Cats, I still have yet to try the original feline-placer. Instead, I’ve jumped straight to The Isle of Cats Duel, which is, I gather, a somewhat improved version of the same game, but in duel format. Two ships enter. Both leave laden with some variable quantity of cats. Also heaps of treasure, but who cares about gold and gems when you have all these cats prowling around?

Cats. Cats in a state of distress.

Cats, it turns out, are useful for a few things. Covering up rats. That’s a big one. Rats, you see, are worth negative points at the end of the game, so covering them up is a good thing. Also, cats excel at filling up the rooms of your ship. Rooms are also worth negative points. Why? I couldn’t tell you. Maybe everybody on the mainland will judge you an insufficient rescuer of cats if they witness a half-empty cargo hold. Wouldn’t want that.

As a more above-the-table matter, cats are also good as variable shapes. Cats do not stack. Instead they lounge about, each occupying an exact amount of space. Your task in The Isle of Cats Duel is to accommodate your cats, fitting them together like motor components. Families of like-shaded cats are worth extra points. Covering treasure maps with the right colors of cats also allows you to put that sweet, sweet loot onto your ship, although think again if you assume treasure is worth anything. Nope. Nothing is as precious as those cats.

I’ll put it this way: it helps if you’re into cats.

My ten-year-old is into cats. Not as much as my five-year-old. The younger one has played The Isle of Cats Duel many times, although her play consists of stacking the cats from the drawstring bag, sans rules or even the ship boards. She says it’s her favorite game. My ten-year-old understands the rules, but also says she mostly likes it because of the cats.

The drafting system is pleasant, if not especially interesting.

I don’t have strong feelings about cats. Neither do I have strong feelings about The Isle of Cats Duel. I enjoy fitting polyominoes together as much as the next red-blooded human. I suspect it’s something we’ve done since caveman times. I imagine stocking my cave with smoked meat and interesting rocks, rejiggering the entire pile multiple times, inventing arithmetic so I can quantify why my collection of quartz is better than Grog’s. When I leave the cave to forage berries, I eye the nearby cats suspiciously. They’ve been hanging around lately. Rubbing themselves against my legs. I think they just like the smoked fish I sometimes toss their way. But Smoona and Ooglet like them. I can tolerate their presence for another season.

The best part of the game is the drafting. You’re presented with a board full of options, both cats and cards, and move a special white cat between spaces to determine which item you’re allowed to claim. The white cat moves up to two spaces at a time, although you can bribe it with fish to move farther, whether a single extra space or teleporting across the entire board. This declaws any scratch the game might have had. It’s flabbier than I would prefer, more about prioritizing what you’d like than about denying your opponent something useful to them.

As for the stuff being drafted, it’s more or less what you’d expect. Apart from the cats, most are scoring cards. These ask the player to adjust their priorities, sometimes fitting cats on the edge of the ship (seems unsafe) or only rescuing so many cats (to the ire of those hold-judgers back home). Treasures might become valuable. Speaking of which, some cards let you add more treasures. Others give you more fish, good for bribing that white cat or nabbing more treasure.

Buncha points.

It’s all perfectly good, without ever rising to the level of inspiring awe. One session proceeds much the same as any other. Nothing is ever offensive or unpleasant, and certainly it doesn’t feel like wasted time. But I come out of those sessions like waking up from a mid-morning nap. A short one, one that isn’t all that refreshing, just a quick snooze in the waiting room at the dentist’s. In my cynical moments, I would say it feels like a board game that was holding back its best ideas for the expansion.

But I don’t know that that’s the case. The Isle of Cats, as I’ve noted, is perfectly fine. I can’t imagine playing it again. It helps if you’re into cats.

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A complimentary copy of The Isle of Cats was provided by the publisher.