Furry Foodies

 

Furry Foodies

Designer	Dave Gage, Kylie Latham
Publisher	The OP games
Age rating	8+
Time	15 min
Players	2-4
Fun	4/5
Complexity	2/5

 

Furry Foodies – a game where you try to feed your chosen hungry cat with as many delicious meals as possible. If you’ve ever had cats, you know they love to eat, but might also cause mayhem in your home.

The game consists of 64 tiles, 25 of which are placed in a grid of 5x5. The cards represent delicious food, from ice cream to bacon. There are also tiles with catnip and cat sak. The titular furry foodies, the cats themselves, are presented by adorable cat pieces that fit on specially designed bases. Everything has a simplistic and cute feel to it, though you shouldn’t really play it on an empty stomach, as all that food might make you hungry. Believe me, I talk from experience.

 

 

The gameplay is simple and easy to learn. At the beginning, your chosen cat starts outside the grid. You move by pushing the tiles in a straight line, and you get two moves. You get the food tiles that you push out, and the empty spaces are replaced with other random food tiles. The goal is to collect sets of same foods, and sets of numbered tiles. But be careful, though. Cats are known to not care too much if they knock something over. In this game, if you push out a broken plate, it takes away from your points at the end of the game.

 

 

Very rarely, you might find yourself in a position where you cannot help but break a plate in order to get the food you want, or move at all. If another cat is blocking you, you cannot go through it – you must choose another way. If there are no options, simply hop out of the grid and start somewhere else. This allows for smooth gameplay and no headaches.

 

That is not to say that there will be no head scratching, however. In order to get the best possible sets of food, you need to plan your moves, not only to get the tiles you want.  You also don’t want the other player to have an easy time collecting all the higher value foods.

 

A three player game

 

The points are counted at the end of the game, but over the course of the game you can see the number of points of each player, since, as the game manual teaches us, cats like to show off. If you feel like you are losing, there isn’t much you can do if the tiles are not arranged in a way beneficial for you. The player downtime is almost non-existent, as the gameplay is fast and you will always know what your approximate next move will be.

 

With a little bit of luck, and a little bit of planning, and a whole bunch of random tiles, the game offers a lot of replayability, as no two tile layouts will be the same. The catnip and the cat sak tiles also add to the possibility of moves you have.

 

Fluffbucket, Snowball, and Flapjack

 

Overall, Furry Foodies is a cute little game that can be learned and played in 20 minutes. Even though it might be simple, you still feel like a kitten that has an insatiable hunger and doesn’t mind breaking a few dishes in order to get the best food. So try it out, and see how it would feel like to be a snacking, jumping, plate breaking ball of fur.