Do you want something that has a feel of Tetris whilst at the same time being more involved and about cats stowed away on boats? The last bit may be a bit specific, but trust me when I say that this game is a blast to play. Isle of Cats: Explore and Draw is a game where you use different coloured pens to draw tetris style shapes onto your dry erase board trying to score the most points.

How Do You Play?

This is a game that plays from 1 to 6 players. Explore and Draw is a drawing version of the big box game Isle of Cats which is a polyominal tile placement game. During this game you are trying to fill up your boats with cats arranged in such a way that you have families of cats clustered together to score points. Cats will only score if they are in a family group of 3 or more of the same colour. The tricky part is that you can only draw the cats adjacent to where they are already placed which means that you do need to think long and hard about not boxing yourself in.

There is no board in this game, but instead a 4×3 grid of cat, treasure and scoring cards which changes each round is used. During this game you play 7 rounds where you will select a column of three cards and these will either be lessons you can mark off at the end for end game scoring or they will be tetris style shaped cats or treasures that you will draw on your boat. These lessons will really add to your scoring, but each lesson you take is a cat or treasure you aren’t drawing so it is a pesky balance to find. You will be trying to get families of cats together whilst also covering the rats printed on the board. You also want to try and fill up each of the rooms in your boat too. Uncovered rats and unfilled rooms will be negative scoring at the end so you need to keep an eye on this.

The solo version of the game plays very similarly, but you also use the included solo cards to determine how the scoring of the solo sister happens which will vary game to game. I have found that this game is really rewarding although I have yet to win.

Who Is It For?

If you want a game that comes in a compact box and offers you a fun experience full of tantalizing decisions where no one can mess with your board then this is for you. This is particularly good for those who enjoyed tetris or have spacial-puzzle loving brains. I do not enjoy other players messing up my hard work and so this is a great one for me as what others are doing does not affect what I can do on my turn.

Which brings me to the other huge pull for me. It is ideal for those who are impatient. There are no turns, you do everything together at the same time! This means there is no downtime waiting for others to complete their turn before you can do yours, also keeping the game snappy too.

Round Up

Perhaps you fancy the idea of a drawing version of a big box game, or maybe it is actually the theme of cats stowing away on boats that tempts you. Whatever it is that sparked your interest, this game gets a big double thumbs up from me and is well worth taking a punt on. For us we have replaced the original game with this smaller version and I for one could not be more impressed with the Isle of Cats Explore And Draw.