Base price: $15.
2 players.
Play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Logged plays: 2

Full disclosure: A review copy of Boop Shuffle was provided by Smirk & Dagger Games.

Note: Some disambiguation! You can also find reviews forboop. and BOOoop..

Boop is kind of everywhere, now, so a card game adaptation felt vaguely inevitable. To be fair, the base game is great, and the holiday-themed spinoffs are delightful. They know how to lean into what makes the core game approachable and just keep moving with it, and I pretty much have no choice to respect that. Scott Brady is also a very nice guy, so, good for him. Not every game survives the to-card-game adaptation, though, so hopefully you’re as curious as I was to see where this one ends up. To that end, why don’t we get started?

In Boop Shuffle, the cats are back! Flatter than you remember them, but maybe that’s something wrong with you? Get that checked. In the meantime, there are also new cats and kittens to worry about! Wild ones, scared ones, and a blanket. Not a cat, but close. Your goal remains the same: three cats in a row to win, but with a new twist. This time, you won’t only be playing your own cats. How’s that going to work? Let’s find out!

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

Not a ton, here! You might remember the various cats and kittens from the original Boop: they’re back as cards! There are five sets of special cards, though: Orange Cats, Gray Cats, Wild Cats, Super Orange Cats, and Super Gray Cats. Make five piles near the edge of the play area and shuffle the other cards, making a deck.

The neoprene lines are meant to be placed to create the outline of a 6×6 board! Do that and you should be ready to start!

Gameplay

It’s Boop Shuffle! You win as soon as you end a turn with three of your cats in a line. Easier said than done, though, since you only have kittens!

To start your turn, draw a card from the deck and play it anywhere on the “board” (in the 6×6 grid space). If you play a Kitten, it “boops” all adjacent kittens, moving them one space away in the direction that they are from the card you played. If you play a cat, it “boops” all cats and kittens in the same way. Easy enough? If you boop a cat or kitten with another card behind it, it does not move. If you would boop a cat or kitten outside of the grid, it’s discarded.

If you end your turn with three of your kittens (or a mix of your cats and kittens) in a row, the kittens graduate! Discard all three cards, removing the kittens in the mix from the game and replacing them with their corresponding cats. A wild kitten gets replaced with a wild cat, and a Super Kitten gets replaced by a Special Cat. Scaredy Kittens actually get replaced with regular cats, though, which is fun. More on them later.

Play continues until any player ends their turn with three of their cats in a row. That player wins!

Special Cards

There are a few types of special cards in the game, as well.

• Scaredy Kittens: Scaredy Kittens are one of the few cards in the game that can get booped by a card that gets booped! Whenever a card gets placed or moved into one of their adjacent squares, they move away in the same direction as though they were just booped.
• The Blanket: You can place the blanket on any cat or kitten to put them to sleep. They’re out of play while the blanket is on them. Booping that card moves the blanket, not the cat or kitten, and if the blanket is booped out of the grid, it’s removed from play. What happens if a cat or kitten is booped onto the blanket? A mystery.
• Super Kittens: They boop cards two spaces away, following standard rules.
• Super Cats: They boop cards over cards that would normally block them. So that’s fun.
• Wild Kittens / Cats: They’re considered to be both players’ colors. That’s fun too, but be careful! You can set your opponent up to win the game if you’re not paying enough attention.

Smarty Cat Mode

To really mess with players, try Smarty Cat Mode! Here, you’re not playing with an explicit grid: as long as the cards are within a 6×6 space, they can be placed anywhere. This means that the 6×6 grid is only defined by the cards on its edges, and it can grow or move as players play! You can use the neoprene lines to spot check, if you want.

Player Count Differences

None with this one! It’s a purely two-player game.

Strategy

• Be very careful with wild cards. They’ll just as easily work for you as against you, since they work for both players.
• When you get your opponent’s cards, use them to either move your cards into position or just place them way the heck out there in the grid. I like using them to move my cards into position, but keep in mind that that means you’re giving your opponent pretty useful board position. That’s not always ideal, so you may just want to banish them to one of the corners. I do that a lot with their cats so that it’s hard for them to use them as a backstop or in any useful way.
• Keep in mind how the booping rules work and how you can use them to your advantage. You can do a lot by just setting up cards so that you backstop other cards. Two kittens in a row means that if I place another on the left side, the middle kitten can’t move because it’s blocked by the kitten behind it. You can set up three in a row pretty easily, as a result.
• You can learn a lot from other X-in-a-row games here. One particularly useful strategy is to try and set up two sets of two cats in a row of your color. Your opponent can block one on their next turn, but assuming you draw a cat of your color or you can shift another into position on your subsequent play, you’ll still win and there’s not a whole lot that they can do about it.
• You can’t rely on traps fully, though, since you may not get your own cards for a while. Sometimes you can go a few turns before you see one of your cards, so even if you have your opponent trapped, you may not be able to play the winning card yourself. In situations like that, look to the cards already on the board and see what you can get set up.
• Big change from standard Boop: you discard cats when the kittens graduate as well. This means that you may not want to have a mixed three-in-a-row if you’re trying to get more cats in play, as you’ll lose board position for some of your cats. This is especially true if you already have two cats in a row, and it’s a great way to mess with your opponent. Play a third card (a kitten) to that line. They’ll get a cat at the end of their turn, yes, but they’ll lose two already-on-the-board cats to the discard pile or have to waste a turn breaking up that configuration. Both are great outcomes for you!

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• More cute cat art is never a bad thing. Look, that’s what got me interested in Boop in the first place. I’m a cat guy. It’s an extremely unpopular position to take in the Greater Seattle Area, so I have to take wins where I can.
• I think the most interesting thing about the game is the subtle shift from being in charge of your own pieces to getting what you get. This really changes up the strategy of the whole game! You can plan ahead much more easily when you know what you’re getting next turn and you can choose whether to play a Cat or a Kitten. Here, you just get what you get and you have to play tactically to make it all work. Sometimes it’s four turns in a row where both players get your opponent’s cards. You have to work to make up for bad luck, and that makes the game very interesting as a result.
• I like the Special Cards; they add enough variety to keep things moving and make up for long stretches of not drawing your color cards. I see the dual purpose of adding something to differentiate Boop Shuffle from Boop and also give players something to do when they’re drawing a bunch of cards that they don’t feel like they can do much with. It’s an anti-player-frustration feature hidden inside of another feature, which is impeccably smart design.
• Very portable. This has been a good week for highly-portable card games and I’m not disappointed. Can you tell I’m starting to think about what to bring to Gen Con?
• Trickier than the standard Boop, which is also interesting. That little change spikes the complexity up a good amount. Not enough that it’s going to be anywhere near heavy, but this goes a bit beyond the standard tricky family-weight that I felt Boop was. This is more on the low-to-medium end of causal, which is pretty cool. I like when games punch a bit above their weight class.

Mehs

• I kind of wish the neoprene lines had been like, snap bracelet-style bands instead. I mostly say this because mine arrived a little pressed / wrinkled from the journey, so it took some doing to get them to lay flat. It makes me wonder how long they’ll last, as well. Something with a bit more structure to it might travel better and lay flat better.

Cons

• As someone who’s fairly type-A, the lack of a board beyond the implied outline of one drives me a little crazy. I just like everything being aligned, especially for photography reasons. If that doesn’t bother you, well, congratulations. Assume I’m saying that purely out of jealousy. I’m extremely jealous. This gets even worse with the Smarty Cat variant, since even the board itself is just implied, and you can play anywhere as long as the total area of play is a 6×6. I do think that’s pretty cool (as I mentioned above), but from a visual alignment perspective it drives me crazy.

Overall: 8.25 / 10

Ok, I’ll be the first to admit that I underestimated Boop Shuffle. I originally struggled to articulate the difference between this and Boop, thinking it was just “Boop with cards”. That’s a particularly reductive misunderstanding of the game, and that’s for one really smart design reason: all the cards are shuffled together. That means on your turn as an orange or grey player, you might draw the other player’s card and be forced to play it. Suddenly, your idea of “offensive” and “defensive” play shifts: do I play this to move my own pieces into position or waste it somewhere where it won’t benefit my opponent? And just like that, a new layer of strategy emerges from just one variation. Granted, that ups the complexity of the game, but not too much. That complexity bump does make the game more interesting to me, though. I didn’t expect that Boop Shuffle was going to have all that in the tank, and I certainly didn’t expect that such a simple change to how the pieces are organized was going to make the game feel so different. I do miss the physical board, but that’s my type-A personality and the photographer talking. Clean grids are much easier to take pictures of. The new cards add a bit of extra intrigue, as well, but honestly I came to Boop for cute cats and I’m getting that and some good two-player strategy out of the deal. It’s a good deal for me. If you’re into cute cats, abstract strategy or card games, I’d definitely recommend taking Boop Shuffle for a spin! It was suprising in a lot of nice ways.

Looking for more great two-player games? Check out my Two-Player Games hub!

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