Mad Cat Sad Cat

We always like to have a light dice chucking game in the bag as a game night filler. The best candidates are games that are intuitively easy to play and, ideally, with a playing time of around 15-20 minutes. On the face of it, Loosey Goosey's Mad Cat Sad Cat falls outside those cut offs: the box gives a playing time of 25 minutes and tho' the rules take only two pages, they seem relatively convoluted. We needn't have worried, however.

Andreas Preiss' design for Mad Cat Sad Cat involves a deck of cards divvied up into the 17 that form the central display and the sets of seven cards to be taken by each of the 2–5 players. In addition there are the dice: five identical custom six-sided dice showing three different white 'Mad Cat' sides, two different black 'Sad Cat' sides and one black & white wild. Tho' the rules refer throughout to cats, the cards give prominence to a badger, and it's the badger who appears to have taken control of the palette because, aside from the pink plastic scoring tokens, everything is printed in monotone black and white.

On your turn, you roll the dice. You're attempting to form Poker-style combos – two pairs, full house, four of a kind or five of a kind – and you can roll as many times as you like with the proviso that you must set aside at least one die after each roll. The further limitation tho' is that you must commit to either Mad Cat (white) or Sad Cat (black) rolls: if the first die you take after your initial roll is a Mad Cat, that locks you out from subsequently taking any Sad Cats you roll.

What distinguishes Mad Cat Sad Cat from the myriad of other Poker Dice games is the involvement of all the other players on every player's turn. As soon as the roller has locked into collecting either Mad Cat or Sad Cat dice, the other players can bet on what the active player will roll by placing one of their 'moocher' cards face down on the table. Those players can claim victory point tokens if the dice at any point match their moocher card; so, for example, a moocher can claim the two pairs reward even if the roller subsequently goes on to roll a full house. Players can bet on the roller going bust (ie: not having a scoring roll and/or not being able to set aside a die).

All Poker Dice variants are push-your-luck games, and Mad Cat Sad Cat is no exception, but it extends the push-your-luck decision space to every player on every player's turn. A prediction that the roller will crash out with no score is likely to be accurate more often than a bet that they will get four of a kind, but the reward is likely to be lower because more moocher cards match that option and multiple players making the same moocher choice means a meagre reward having to be shared.

For us, Mad Cat Sad Cat is at its best at higher player counts because the more moochers that are in, the more it can be worth players taking a chance on scooping a higher unique reward. Our plays of Mad Cat Sad Cat have mostly come in at around 20 minutes, and we've even managed to push the player count to six. The game only comes with five sets of moocher cards but these cards aren't needed by the roller when they are the active player so you can make them available to a sixth player.

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