How much do you like cats? Are you a cat person? If your answer to that question is a yes, then your enjoyment of Affectionate: Cats and Cuddles by Blue Heron Games will increase exponentially. Affectionate: Cats and Cuddles is a dice game for two to five players. It’s listed as being suitable for ages 12 and up. But it doesn’t have a lot of complex strategy to it, so I feel like maybe you can get away with some younger kids playing the game as long as they don’t put the pieces in their mouths. The average game of Affectionate: Cats and Cuddles runs about ten minutes long.
Affectionate: Cats and Cuddles’ main gameplay mechanic revolves around two six-sided “cat dice”. The cat dice have three symbols on them, repeated twice: a heart, a paw, and a person. Each turn of the game, everyone at the same time rolls their cat dice while giving a hearty “3, 2, 1, Meow!” Then everyone takes an action depending on what they rolled. There are six possible results from the cat dice. To win the game, you want cat actions that are going to lead you to getting the most cuddle tokens. Cuddle Tokens are the game’s currency. The game starts with a pot of these heart shaped tokens on the board, between 13 for a two player game and 25 for a five player game. If you have the most cuddle tokens at the end of play, you’re the top cat.
A roll of a heart and a person on your cat dice means you were a sweet cat and you have earned a cuddle token. If you roll two hearts, you were a super sweet cat and you get two cuddles. If you’re not a cat person, I think right about there is where I lost you. If you aren’t a cat person, you can still enjoy this game on its base mechanics: you rolled a double and earned two tokens. If you roll two paws then you have been a mischievous cat and you take a cuddle token from another player. If you roll a paw and a person, you were caught. Caught doing what? The game doesn’t specify so I leave that to your imagination what a caught cat might be. I look to my own two cats, Diablo and Kitty, and picture them coughing up a furball on something valuable, but your cat mileage may vary. If you’re a caught cat, you lose a cuddle token. Interesting mechanic here- if you don’t have any cuddle tokens to lose, you get to force another player to lose one in your stead. Another cat taking the blame? Cats are tricky that way.
A roll of a heart and paw means you were a silly cat and earns you a Silly Token. Silly Tokens are grey mouse shaped tokens that add a touch of strategy to the game. If you have two Silly Tokens at the beginning of a turn, you can turn them in and reroll your cat dice. If you have three Silly Tokens, you can turn them in and force an opponent to reroll their cat dice. Silly tokens add some much needed depth to the game. In all my playthroughs, figuring out when to use them meant the difference between winning and losing. The last of the cat dice rolls is for double persons, aka the “Humans!” roll. If you roll double persons, you must roll a separate die. This die is six-sided, three sides with a frowning face and three with a smiling face. Get the smile and you have incurred the human’s favour and can take two cuddle tokens from anywhere, including your opponents. Get the frown and you have angered the humans, which means that you must give one of your cuddle tokens to another player.
The gameplay goes on until the pot is empty and whoever has the most cuddle tokens at that point is the winner. The gameplay is not complex and can go very fast, so it’s an easy game to pick up and play. The instruction manual is not the best and might lead you astray but at the heart of this game, beyond the cats, it’s a simple dice game. It’s kind of like craps but without any betting involved.
The It’s Treat Time expansion adds a couple of quirks to the game. Each player is given a mat and a cat shaped pawn. The pawns add nothing to the gameplay unless you are one of the cat lovers I mentioned at the beginning of this article. You can appreciate the different cat poses on the pawns but they don’t actually factor into gameplay. The mats, which include adorable drawings of the cats on the aforementioned tokens, change the gameplay slightly. In the advanced mode, everyone rolls their dice and then everyone takes one of the dice they rolled and puts it on their mat. Then each player, in turn, gets to pick a die from the remaining pool of rolled dice to place on their mat. Here’s an example: say that I rolled a paw and a person. I could pick up the person at the beginning of my turn, then pick up a heart from the pool of dice in the second part of my turn, turning my losing 1 cuddle token into winning 1 cuddle token. The advanced version adds another layer of strategy but at the same time, the games seem to be shorter since every turn includes someone making a play that is the most optimal to their win strategy.
The Treat Time mode of the game utilises the pawns but honestly they are unnecessary to how it works. Treat Time works just like the Advanced game accept after the dice roll, everyone takes turns playing someone else’s mat. (Please note that you can’t play a two player Treat Time game.) The pawns are your way of signifying whose mat you are playing but you can just say it aloud and it works just as well. It was my least favourite of the three different game modes because it gave you no benefit to making a great dice roll because you know it’s not going to be yours unless you’re the fortunate one to be going first that turn. Every turn feels like making the best out of a bad situation.
Affectionate: Cats and Cuddles is a fun dice with some extra added elements to make it more about strategy than luck. Since the game isn’t long and is easy to set up, it’s perfect for taking out on a weekend afternoon and having a quick play with the kids, especially if your kids are obsessed with cats.
Affectionate: Cats and Cuddles was designed by Trevor Harron, and is published by Blue Heron. It is available now on the Blue Heron website.
