Cat’s Gambit: Queen Aurelia

• What's Eric Playing?
A box for the board game 'Cat's Gambit: Queen Aurelia', featuring a cartoon cat with a crown on a chessboard background.

Base price: $XX.
1 player.
Play time: 10 – 20 minutes.
BGG Link
Logged plays: 2

Full disclosure: A review copy of Cat’s Gambit: Queen Aurelia was provided by Sunrise Tornado Game Studio.

It felt like a solo games week, and so here we are. There will be two, and, of course, they’re only for solo gamers. I mean, when we talk about solo gaming there’s always, as I say in places, just having multiple people play a solo game together. Pandemic is a solo game if you play with open hands, for instance. It’s wild that I haven’t reviewed that. Maybe some day. But I digress. This one is a title from our friends at Sunrise Tornado: Cat’s Gambit!

In Cat’s Gambit: Queen Aurelia, your goal is simple: it’s chess-ish! You want to add cards to the board to solve a chess puzzle with Queen Aurelia close to the center. If she gets captured by Cat-kens (cat krakens, obviously), you risk putting her in check, and if she gets checkmated the game is over. So play carefully so you’re not forced into a bad move. Can you get 20 points?

Contents

Setup

Hardly any. Set Queen Aurelia nearby (Queen Umbra is expansion-only):

Two character cards featuring Queen Umbra and Queen Aurelia from the game Cat's Gambit, with a yellow paw print token in the foreground.

Shuffle the Bishop, Rook, Knight, and Cat-ken cards together to form the deck:

A flat lay of game cards from Cat's Gambit: Queen Aurelia, featuring playful illustrations of cat characters as chess pieces, including Cat-kens, Knights, Bishops, and Rooks, arranged on a checkerboard background.

Shuffle the Pawns and place five face-up nearby. The rest can be removed from the game.

A collection of game cards from Cat's Gambit: Queen Aurelia, featuring various cat illustrations and unique gameplay actions, including cards for Pawns and Cat-kens.

Place the deck next to the Queen and place the Paw on top of the deck. You’re ready to start!

A layout of game cards from Cat's Gambit: Queen Aurelia, featuring several Paw cards with instructions, and the main Queen Aurelia card showing her score.

Gameplay

A collection of game cards from Cat's Gambit: Queen Aurelia, featuring a cute cat Knight character, the card for Queen Aurelia, a paw token, and the game's title card. The cards are placed against a black background.

Your goal here is simple: earn points without checkmating the Queen! Here’s how each turn works:

To start, draw a card, then place it according to chess rules based on where the Paw currently is.

  • Rook: Can be placed anywhere orthogonally from the Paw.
  • Bishop: Can be placed anywhere diagonally from the Paw.
  • Knight: Can be placed anywhere in an L-shape from the Paw. Standard knight move rules.
  • Cat-ken: Can be placed anywhere in an orthogonal or diagonal line from the Paw. Try to avoid placing them in an orthogonal or diagonal line from the Queen! If you do, you Check the Queen and flip her over to the lower points side. If you check twice, you lose!

The major rule on placement is that you cannot place cards outside of a 4×4 square. At any point, you can play a Pawn instead of your standard action, but you cannot place two Pawns in a row. You don’t have to use the Pawn’s ability, but it can help!

The game continues until one of three things happens:

  • The Queen is checkmated. You lose!
  • You can’t play a card that you’ve drawn. The game ends!
  • There’s only one card left in the deck. The game ends!
A flat lay of the game Cat's Gambit: Queen Aurelia, featuring various character and action cards with illustrations of cats, paw prints, and a colorful game board design.

Once the game ends, it’s time to tally up scores! You earn 1 / 3 / 6 / 10 points for each of the four Catkin currently in the play area (even if they’re covered). You earn 5 points if the Queen is in one of the four middle squares, and 1 or 5 points depending on which side of the Queen is up. You also lose 2 points (to a maximum of -5) for every card remaining in the deck (except the last one).

Total up your points and see how you did!

Player Count Differences

This one’s a solo game, so, again, not going to be a huge issue here.

Strategy

Close-up of game cards from 'Cat's Gambit' featuring a cat illustration, a paw piece, and game instructions.
  • There’s something to leaving certain spaces open for Cat-kens if you can. You want to leave spaces so that they can be placed without checking the Queen when they’re placed. So having a few available spots for that can be useful for saving you some points.
  • Moving the Queen can be useful, as Cat-kens only check her when they’re placed. You can actually do a pretty good thing by placing Cat-kens early and then moving the Queen into threatened spots of their since they’re only a threat on placement.
  • It’s worth keeping the Queen in the center four spaces, if you can, though there’s risk there. A lot more spaces can impact the center four with Cat-kens, for instance, but if you manage to keep the Queen there there’s 5 points in it for you. That’s not nothing!
  • The game ends if you can’t play a card, so keep the probabilities in mind when you’re drawing cards. You should know what card is most likely to come up and plan accordingly. You’ll mostly need to plan most aggressively for the Knights, since they’re the trickiest cards to place.
  • Use Pawn for their abilities, yes, but also use them to build out the board and space out where your next card needs to go. Just keep in mind that the more Pawns there are on the board, the fewer free spaces there will be for future cards. You also can’t play two Pawns in a row!
  • One card isn’t going to be played; make sure that’s not a Cat-ken! If it is, you’ll lose a bunch of points (you score more for having more Cat-kens on the board). There might be ways to put other cards on the bottom of the deck?
  • Try to take out Queen Umbra ASAP, if you can. She’s strictly a ton of negative points, and the next Cat-ken will just refresh her if you haven’t already checkmated her, so get to it.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

A flat lay of cards from the game 'Cat's Gambit: Queen Aurelia', featuring colorful illustrations of cat characters and game mechanics.

Pros

  • The Cat-kens are my favorite. They’re little evil cat squids; it’s great.
  • In general, great art, though. In general cats wearing fancy hats is pleasant and amusing.
  • A nice and quick spatial game. This week is a good week for spatial reasoning games, but I like having to think about your options and the probability of having to play certain ways each turn and this game definitely gives me that.
  • Another great opportunity to use chess-style gameplay without having to play chess. I like chess moves! They’re interesting! I just don’t like chess all that much, so getting to experience it in other ways is fine by me.
  • The portability is very nice as well. It almost fits in my pocket, but it’ll fit in a backpack (or purse probably) very easily.
  • The included expansion is a nice way to add some extra challenge. It’s a quick challenge that’s great once you’ve gotten the flow of the game down; I’d love to see additional challenges and more complex gameplay if this game is ever expanded.

Mehs

  • It feels like it would have made a certain amount of sense for the Pawns to be double-sided. It’s obviously much cheaper to not do that, but it would help ensure that the Pawns don’t get accidentally shuffled into the rest of the cards when they’re supposed to be set aside.
  • I already don’t love shuffling square cards, but trying to shuffle a small number of square cards is vaguely irritating. That’s just the nature of shuffling a small number of cards, unfortunately.

Cons

  • There’s a certain element of luck to this one, since having a Cat-ken on the bottom of the deck or drawing one at a bad time can cost you a lot of points. There are a few ways you can fix this with Pawn powers, but that also requires you to have those Pawns in play, which can be frustrating if neither thing goes your way.

Overall: 7.75 / 10

A tabletop game board featuring various cat-themed game cards, including a Knight, Rook, Bishop, and Cat-ken cards, arranged on a colorful grid with the title 'CAT'S GAMBIT' prominently displayed in the center.

Overall, I think Cat’s Gambit: Queen Aurelia is fun! I’m not entirely clear if the subtitle is because there are more games planned in the series or not, but if there are, I’m all for them! In the interim I’m using the subtitle though until I’m told otherwise? But anyways, I’m not a huge chess guy. Got “taught” it early in my life and didn’t have a great experience, so not really into it now. I love abstract strategy games more generally, so you’d think I would like it, but not so. Chess-like games, however, are quite fun, and this is no exception. I’m also keeping an eye on Chess Joker from Asmadi, but more on that later, potentially? Here, the name of the game is keeping it simple. You get the four funnest move styles in chess (queen / rook / knight / bishop) and you have to try and solve a puzzle without messing it up too much. Love it. There’s also plenty of ways to make that more interesting, and the expansion already does that, to some degree. I appreciate any attempts to make chess more approachable and to make compact puzzle games, and as is the case with a lot of my reviews of Ta-Te Wu’s games, he’s done it again. I think I’d like to see more complexity in an expansion, just to give me as the player more to do, but otherwise I’m happy with this as-is. If that sounds up your alley, you’ve got a thing for chess puzzles, or you just like great cat art, Cat’s Gambit: Queen Aurelia might be just what you’re looking for! I had fun with it.

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