Magicats
Reiner Knizia is a famously prolific games designer but tho' he has designed literally hundreds of different games not all of his designs are unique: a number of his games have been reworked, reinvented and rethemed. Case in point, Magicats, which is published by Korea Boardgames. It's an arena combat game themed around warring feline mages but if it feels familiar it's because it's a reworking of Battle of Mekaverse (Kids Logic) which was themed around warring robots. And look back further and you'll find that Dr Knizia's Clash of the Gladiators (Hans im Gluck) is essentially the same game.
Tho' gladiators and mechs may be more conventional combatants, there's no denying that the cats in this incarnation are cute, and Korea Boardgames have done a fine job in the production of all the different acrylic cat standees and the bases that can accommodate tiles showing each cat's magical abilities.
Magicats is a game of two halves. In the first phase the 2–4 players take turns placing out their cats on the modular board and drafting the spells they want to allocate to them. Only when all the cats are out and each has four magic tokens slotted in to their bases does combat begin...
For the battle phase, movement is optional but combat is mandatory. Melee attacks are to an opponent's cat in an orthogonally adjacent square; ranged attacks are to an opponent's cat in a straight horizontal or vertical line. Combat involves rolling 1–6 custom six-sided dice (0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2) with the number of dice rolled determined by your cat's magic tiles. For every 2 points of damage taken, you remove a magic token and the victorious battler takes it as a trophy.
Magicats then is an game of tactical attrition where the pieces get less rather than more powerful as the game progresses. When a cat loses its last magic token, that cat is eliminated. The game ends when there's just one cat left standing but in a three- or four-player game the owner of the last remaining cat won't necessarily be the winner because a previously eliminated player may have won more battles overall and so have more trophies.
The four-piece modular board of the basic game represents a library with book stacks acting as obstacles. By way of variety, you can flip all the boards to replace the library arena with an outdoor battle setting with various different terrain features. Either way, you can expect to play a game of Magicats in around 30-45 minutes, depending on player count.
