Base price: $35.
2 players.
Play time: 20 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 4
Full disclosure: A review copy of boop. was provided by Smirk & Dagger.
More two-player games! I’m always trying to find good ones, so I’m excited when they come across my desk. I’m a bit late to the party on this one, but I figured I needed to try it out before Spooky Boop comes haunting around closer to Halloween. So here we are! This is a close one to my heart, since it won the American Tabletop Awards for Early Gamers. I hadn’t gotten a chance to write it up fully for y’all, so now I get to! Always excited to check it out. Let’s see how boop. plays!
In boop., players take on the role of various kittens trying to push each other off of a bed. As they are wont to do! As the kittens line themselves up, however, they grow up into cats! Cats are much harder to push, so kittens just can’t do it. Line up three of your cats to win this quick and cozy abstract game! Can you pull off a purrfect victory? Or will you just end up on the wrong side of the bed?
Contents
Player Count Differences
None! Two-player only game.
Strategy
- You want to graduate to at least three cats pretty quickly. Cats are how you win the game, after all, so having more cats usually gets you on the way towards winning faster. Plus, your opponent’s kittens can’t move your cats at all, so you might be able to set up a victory that your opponent is unable to block.
- Pushing your own cats and kittens around isn’t necessarily bad. You can push them into useful spots, pop them off the board so that you’ve got more options, or push them to block your opponent’s moves. Pushing your opponent’s kittens and cats is usually more of the goal, though.
- Thinking a few moves ahead is pretty good, here. You can’t just focus on where your opponent’s cats and kittens currently are; you need to think and plan around where they might be after your push or where your opponent can push them to.
- Setting up places where your cats and kittens are difficult to move can be helpful. So, for instance, if you have two kittens in a row or something, the middle kitten can’t be pushed into the far kitten (since you can only boop one kitten at a time). This means that you can place a third kitten on that spot and graduate all three of them to cats without worrying about them moving. You may find circumstances where that works for your cats, as well!
- If you need to remove one of your own pieces from the board, remove one that’s not doing much for you. Don’t take one out that you’re trying to push into a three-in-a-row! That’s less helpful.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Cats! Kittens! It’s really nice to see more cat games, and I really enjoy how cute thematically “booping” other cats and kittens one space away whenever they’re placed. It’s a cute theme.
- Very approachable. One thing that I like about the game is that it includes instructions for younger players to make the game even easier to learn, which is nice.
- Art-wise, very cute. The cats are upbeat and happy, and the four different types of tokens have different little faces on them, which is nice.
- Component quality is also very high. I really enjoy the quilted cushion that’s the game board, and I like that it’s placed on top of the box bottom for some extra height. The cat and kitten tokens are also pretty nice! I appreciate how round the cats are; it’s very accurate and satisfying.
Mehs
- I wouldn’t say you can stalemate, but it is possible to get into a slow loop where you’re countering each others’ moves. It’s a natural consequence of fairly-balanced abstract games where there’s no differentiation between players. Sometimes you are just evenly matched. It can make the game feel like it runs a bit long, but usually someone makes a mistake and that speeds things up.
Cons
- Actually one of the games that I think plays a bit worse on Board Game Arena. There’s something to the tactile sensation of playing and moving the pieces around and booping them off the board, and on Board Game Arena you’re missing out on a lot of that. I don’t normally find a lot of games that I’m particularly finicky about playing in person that aren’t real-time or dexterity games, but I’d usually prefer playing boop. In person as well.
Overall: 8 / 10
Overall, I think boop. is a lot of fun! I mean, I’d hope that I felt that way since The American Tabletop Awards gave boop. its Early Gamers award and I’m on the Committee, but, I mean, I’ve disagreed with some decisions in the past. It’s how committees work. I do think that it falls into a bit of an interesting pit with regards to the “gaming” community writ large, though. I notice this a lot when I review lighter games (and I review lighter games a lot); there’s a skew on BGG that works against lighter games, just because I think the audience on BGG is more self-selecting than it can appear, at times. But that’s an interesting conversation for another time, I think. Boop. is a fundamentally approachable and extremely cute game, smartly using the theme of cats and kittens and some wonderful aesthetic touches (quilted game board) to make abstract gaming thematically approachable. Chess too bland? Boop. is pretty and fun. It’s not quite as complex, granted, but that’s almost a pro, to me? Playing it physically did turn me off of the Board Game Arena version; the tactile aspects of the game are super important to me, surprisingly. But I ended up having a blast with boop.! If you’re a cat fan, you want to start on abstract games, or you just like making sound effects as you play, I’d recommend checking boop. out!
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