Herding Cats: Thinky Thoughts and Scaredy Cats in BOOoop

I see board games in the store and they always look so cool and then I buy them and bring them home, I’m so excited to open them, and then I play them, like, twice… This column is dedicated to the love of games for those of us whose eyes may be bigger than our stomachs when it comes to playing, and the joy that we can all take from games, even if we don’t play them very often.

———

Finding good board games to play in a two-person household can be challenging – but there are also some games that are designed expressly to be played with only two people, such as Boop (stylized boop.) which bills itself as “A very ‘thinky’ game for two clever cats.”

Designed by Scott Brady with art by Curt Covert, Boop is one of those games that could readily be described as “easy to play, impossible to master.” In essence, it is a strategy game that is not dissimilar to a more complicated form of tic tac toe.

The game board (which is just the box turned upside down) is a “bed,” made up of a stitched pad with several squares. Into any one of these squares, you can play one of your kittens (represented by adorable meeples). If three kittens line up, they “graduate” into a full-sized cat. If three cats line up, you win the game.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that. When you play a kitten, it “boops” any kittens adjacent to it one space away – including off the board (or bed) entirely. This makes getting your kittens into a line like, well, herding cats. Full-grown cats do the same thing, but while a cat can “boop” a kitten, a kitten cannot “boop” a cat.

Lining up your various cats and kittens, while preventing your opponent from doing the same, is a juggling act of maneuvering your meeples into the right spaces and arranging your “boops” strategically. The rules as they are laid out in the rulebook sound more fraught than the way the game actually plays, and Boop proves to be easy to pick up and quick to learn, with a game often taking less than half-an-hour. Better still, it’s a perfect fit for two players, and just as “thinky” as the box promises.

At the time of this writing, there are actually several different versions of Boop on the shelves. The regular edition is what I’ve just described, with basic artwork of a bedspread, cats, and kittens. Naturally, however, that’s not actually the version I own. The version I own is the Halloween-themed BOOoop, which has black cats in witch hats and ghostly white ones with pumpkins. It also introduces a new play element: ghost cats, which move along a straight line between the various squares on the game board, “booping” the cats and kittens they encounter along the way.

As you might imagine, the ghost cats add a precarious new element to a game that is already easy to play but filled with strategic plate-spinning. I haven’t actually tried them much, but they certainly seem like they would change the dynamic.

There’s also a Christmas-themed version called Boop the Halls. While Boooop is largely the same game with a festive new skin and one (optional) mechanical wrinkle, however, Boop the Halls makes some more sweeping changes. Instead of a bed, the board in Boop the Halls is a four-tiered Christmas tree, with the cats (now decked out in scarves and stocking caps) not only “booping” one another around, but also knocking decorations off the tree.

It also introduces a “Naughty” new way to win, by knocking off three of your opponent’s decorations. (You can still win the “Nice” way, too; by lining up three of your own cats.)

According to the publisher, the changes to the gameplay present “a surprisingly mind-bending 3D challenge for players. And the alternate win condition of knocking off 3 of your opponent’s ornaments creates new strategic problems to solve, elevating the play experience to a new high!”

I haven’t actually tried out Boop the Halls, so I can’t speak to how accurate that is.

Originally released in 2022, Boop became a quick hit, winning a Mensa award and churning out the two seasonal “sequels” in short order. While the adorable “cat herding” nature of Boop is probably integral to its retail success, the gameplay itself dates back farther, re-implementing a game that Scott Brady had released digitally in 2020 called Gekitai.

From what I’ve read online, the gameplay in Gekitai is virtually identical (possibly without the element of “upgrading” your pieces), but there your pieces are simply colored discs (think a classic game like Checkers or Go) rather than cats.

Obviously, the narrative element of making the pieces into cute cats helps to sell the game considerably. I probably wouldn’t have ever picked up Gekitai, however much fun it might have been, but I bought Boooop.

———

Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.