It's more than four years since we featured Sunrise Tornado's Cat Sudoku: Roll for Kyoto on Board's Eye View. Now Cat Sudoku is back - but whereas Roll for Kyoto was a roll & write game, this Summer Festival game is a challenging card game for 1-4 players. The cute feline art is by Kaiami.
Ta-Te Wu's Cat Sudoku: Summer Festival uses a deck of square cards numbered 1-9 in five colours, tho' you remove a colour if you're playing solitaire or as a two-player game. Players start with three cards each which are placed face-up as their reserve. On your turn you draw a card and you either place it in the shared 3 x 3 grid or you add it to your reserve. If your grid placement meets the conditions set out on the card (for example, being placed in a corner position) you take a cube. As an extra action on your turn you can spend two cubes to place out any card from your reserve.
Grid placement follows modified Sudoku rules in that you cannot duplicate a number or a colour in any row or column. You'll often tho' be stacking cards on top of others, so the grid is dynamic and its various number and colour restrictions therefore alter through the course of the game. When the deck is exhausted, you'll score only for those stacks with two or more cards, and in the multi-player game only for the specific column allocated to you. You're penalised for any cards left in your reserve.
Cat Sudoku: Summer Festival looks simple but it makes for a challenging solitaire puzzle and a tricksy tactical game as players try both to maximise their own score while simultaneously using the Sudoku restrictions to hamper their opponents' placements. In that regard we've especially enjoyed the two-player game, where players are scoring only the left versus right columns and the central column is primarily used to make things more difficult for the other player. It's often proven to be a winning strategy to focus initially on earning cubes so that in the latter part of the game you can place out multiple cards from your reserve. Note tho' that the reserves are open information, so canny players will be keeping a weather eye on each other's reserve with the aim of limiting their opponent's placement opportunities...