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  "description": "Spot cats, place kittens, floof dogs, destroy houses, and fight rats",
  "path": "/treat-new-pets-to-time-on-the-table/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-09T06:00:21.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.wericmartin.com",
  "tags": [
    "**_Treat, Please!_**",
    "Solis Game Studio",
    "a designer diary",
    "a crowdfunding campaign",
    "**_Cat Spotting_**",
    "a print-and-play version",
    "**_Peep Spotting_**",
    "**_Muffin's Kitchen_**",
    "Level 99 Games",
    "crowdfund",
    "**_Kittens in Space_**",
    "Dead Alive Games",
    "crowdfunded",
    "**_Cat Earth_**",
    "Outset Media",
    "RAYBOX Games",
    "_Escape from Stalingrad Z_",
    "_Gates of Niflheim_",
    "**_The Cats of Mont Saint-Michel_**",
    "**_The Kittens of Mont Saint-Michel_**",
    "**_The Cats of New Orleans_**"
  ],
  "textContent": "If you want to create a game that's more approachable for those who aren't gamers, perhaps you should consider making a game about animals. Even if people don't have pets, they generally know what pets are like, which gives them a leg up on learning a new game...assuming you make those animals do pet-like things, mind you.\n\nThat's what Courtney Shernan did with her debut release: **_Treat, Please!_**, which publisher Solis Game Studio released on the market in February 2026. As Shernan details in a designer diary, she mocked up the idea in 2019, then worked on it heavily in 2020 before pitching it to Chris Solis, who oversaw development, art, and production, with a crowdfunding campaign running in late 2024.\n\nThe game lasts seven days, and on each day you play two behavior cards from your hand to gain attention, energy, bones, and indicated actions. Bones let you acquire new behavior cards, which go to your hand for future turns, while attention and energy let you complete objectives for affection, which is the game's scoring metric.\n\n• • • • • • • • • • • • • •\n\nGames about cats seem far more plentiful than those about dogs, but I don't know whether that's an indication of the dog market being underserved, of cat lovers buying more games, or of something else entirely. Maybe cats are just better than dogs, ergo we have more cat games than dog games. Maybe dog owners are playing with their dogs in real life, whereas cat owners need playful substitutes since cats can't be bothered to associate with humans.\n\nJason Tam's self-published game **_Cat Spotting_** debuted in late 2025, and gameplay is as simple as you can get: Turn over a \"Spot This Cat\" card, then spot this cat. The game includes 120 cats to spot and four sets of crowd cards, with each crowd card featuring forty cats.\n\nIn fact, rules for multiple games are included with _Cat Spotting_ , and a print-and-play version is available for those who don't want to wait for a game from Australia. (Tam also has **_Peep Spotting_** for those who'd prefer to peep people over cats.)\n\n• • • • • • • • • • • • • •\n\nHmm, _Cat Spotting_ seems to be the only realistic cat game on the market: Look at cats sitting there doing nothing.\n\nEvery other cat-centric design places them in unrealistic settings and activities. For example, in **_Muffin's Kitchen_**, a D. Brad Talton Jr. design for 2-5 players that Level 99 Games will crowdfund in March 2026, cats assemble ingredients to fulfill recipes.\n\nIn each of six rounds, you can ditch up to three ingredient cards from your hand and draw replacement cards up to three times, then everyone in turn reveals the ingredients for one of five recipe cards, summing the value of all ingredients used and marking their score for that recipe. You can repeat a recipe in a future round, but only your most recent score stands. At game's end, players earn ribbons depending on where they placed (first to fourth) in each recipe, and whoever has the most ribbon points wins.\n\n• • • • • • • • • • • • • •\n\nJeff and Rylie Wallace's **_Kittens in Space_**, which Dead Alive Games crowdfunded in mid-2025, puts 1-6 players to work in the Lunar Kitten Adoption Center to find homes for gravity-challenged cats — although in gameplay terms that means you need to shed your hand of cards first.\n\nEach player has a hand of cards, which are numbered 0-9, and four discard piles are available, with a \"Save 'Em\" card on one pile; arrows on this card show whether the piles to the left must have higher cards played on them and piles to the right lower cards or vice versa. Each turn, you either draw a card and pass, or play up to one card on each discard pile, with the difference between your card and the covered card being at most two. In the latter case, you then move the \"Save 'Em\" card to a pile where you played, flipping it if you played a cat bell card.\n\n• • • • • • • • • • • • • •\n\nGareth Edwards' **_Cat Earth_**, which is coming from Outset Media in Q1 2026, is somewhat realistic in that cats like to knock things onto the floor, and that's what you're doing in this game.\n\nHowever, the cat doing the action is three times the size of a house, and it's knocking houses off the edge of a flat Earth. Okay. Players take turns using movement cards to direct the cat, trying to push opponents' houses into the abyss, and each time the deck runs out, a new cat is added to the board, allowing for more breakage. To win, be the last player with a house still standing.\n\n• • • • • • • • • • • • • •\n\nMock-up components in __The Cats of Mont Saint-Michel__ ahead of the crowdfunding campaign\n\nPublisher RAYBOX Games released a few \"serious\" fantasy titles in the early 2020s — _Escape from Stalingrad Z_, _Gates of Niflheim_ — but its newest releases have moved on from zombies and Vikings to cats and more cats, all of which are doing rather uncatlike things.\n\nIn late 2025, for example, it crowdfunded **_The Cats of Mont Saint-Michel_**, a 1-4 player design from Marco Pecota and Tom Frank that has started shipping to backers. This miniatures-based solitaire/co-operative game is set in Mont Saint Michel before the French revolution, with the cat players fighting cockroaches, rats, and other beings in order to cleanse the abbey. The game features a coil-bound scenario book, with the outcome of each scenario affecting what comes next.\n\nThe Gamefound campaign also featured a separate design by Pecota, with **_The Kittens of Mont Saint-Michel_** being a co-operative card game in which you \"explore the town and castle while learning the virtues courage, patience, competence, selflessness, perseverance and integrity on the path to becoming a true warrior\", with the game ending with a battle against a vermin army.\n\nCover artwork for __The Cats of New Orleans__\n\nAnd with _Cats_ in boxes on the way to backers, RAYBOX has revealed its next release: **_The Cats of New Orleans_**, with this also being a miniatures-based solitaire/co-operative game that features a coil-bound scenario book, with the outcome of each scenario affecting what comes next. Hmm, déjà vu! You're now fighting mosquitos and snakes, in addition to rats, so that's different.\n\n• • • • • • • • • • • • • •\n\nLike what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism!\n\nLeave a tip",
  "title": "Treat New Pets to Time on the Table",
  "updatedAt": "2026-03-09T06:00:21.257Z"
}