Kitties!
Today my daughter turned one! She loves cats, so we went to a cat café and had a wonderful time playing with all the kitties. In her honour, I decided to do Laser Kittens today. Originally I was going to leave this out since I did Magical Kitties Save The Day already, but they're very different games and anyway... kitties!
In Laser Kittens you play as a group of tiny tiny kittens at a foster home. There are big cats who show you what to do and humans and maybe other animals, and you have to learn how to be a cat. The biggest difficulty is learning how to use your laser. All cats have a laser (you may have seen their eyes charging if you looked at the right time) that can do magical effects. Tiny kittens have very little control over their eye lasers, which will fire at random times for random effects. All lasers rhyme with 'pew pew pew' and there's twenty different possible lasers, with effects ranging from the comical to the astronomical. Lasers are represented with a series of five face-down cards, which you gradually flip face up. You can trigger a laser early and flip all the cards, otherwise after every scene one card flips up, and when they're all up the laser triggers. You add up all the cards; black cards are positive, red cards are negative, and the total determines whether the effect will be positive or negative, and how great its magnitude will be. I'll give an example of what lasers might do with my character in a minute.
Kittens go on adventures throughout the Knoll Street School For Wayward Kittens, adventures like 'go down the stairs and out the cat door.' When you're a tiny kitten with an out-of-control laser, everything is a huge adventure! This game also does not have a dedicated GM - players take turn being the Class Captain and running challenges. Task resolution involves playing a face-down card against a face-down card from the Class Captain and seeing whose is higher. At the end of the scene, the class captain awards cards from their hand to kittens who behaved in a mature manner and swaps them with cards in that kitten's laser. The game is designed for one-off play, but there's also options for turning it into a campaign that ends when the kittens find their Forever Home.
Character Creation: Very simple. I decided to name my kitten Strudel. I picked up a hand of five cards and checked the chart to see what my five possible lasers were. I decided to go with Crew Crew Crew, which makes me be the leader. If I my laser goes off negatively, I might have a Professor (older cat) stop me, or I might summon zombie kitten minions that also want to eat our brains. If it goes off positively, I might let the group automatically succeed at a plan I suggested, or even make a peace treaty with the rats that live in the walls!
We also pick five random classes that we're studying. Two of them are rated at A, two at B and one at C. So I have Computer Sciences A and History A, Chemisty B and Electrical Engineering B, and finally Food Preparation C. (Other people should prepare my food for me!)
Finally, I pick a Lesson I want to learn. I think Strudel might be a bit bossy, and needs to learn to be less so. And, once I've drawn a little picture of a cat, that's it!
Final Thoughts: SUPER cute. The misfiring lasers are almost surreal, which is cool. This is a nifty little indie game. If you like cats, you should check it out.
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