Blancat

Here's a puzzle: a game involving cats and blankets, and called Blancat. It's a stetched pun that works in English but which surely doesn't work in its native Korean, where we reckon the title translates as Black Cat.

Blancat is designed by Nutgoo Lee and published by Korea Boardgames. It's a real-time manual dexterity pattern-building puzzle game where the 2–4 players are racing to be the first to fold the coloured strips on the blanket to match the pattern on the card for the round. Actually, strictly speaking, other than in a two-player game, you don't need to be first you just need not to be the last to make the pattern. Assuming all the completed patterns were accurate, the player who was slowest takes the pattern card as their penalty. If a player has claimed to finish but their pattern doesn't match the card, then it is them who take the penalty.

The game is played until a player accumulates three penalty cards, at which point they lose and the other players win. This works of course in a two-player game but it is less satisfying with three or four players. If you're playing with players who insist on games identifying a clear, single winner, you can of course just carry on playing until there's just one player left in. Blancat plays quickly enough for it not to lumber the early eliminated player with an overly long wait.

You can step up the difficulty of the dexterity pattern-building challenge by insisting that the blanket strips are all tucked in so that the finished blanket doesn't unravel when tipped upside down. In our plays at Board's Eye View we added this requirement as a way of handicapping adults playing with children and adult klutzes who were allowed to claim success with a looser weave.

With its cute cartoon art from Luna Vargas, Blancat is a game that children are bound to find appealing. Korea Boardgames have included screenprinted wooden cat tokens for players to grab when they finish a puzzle. The game comes with 20 easy and 20 hard puzzle cards so there's ample play value. Our worry is over just how well the blanket strips will hold up to the rough and tumble of a manual dexterity and puzzle game where speed is of the essence.

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