Here at Invincible Ink we’d like to announce the launch of Cat & The Mouse! If you’ve ever wanted to play a stealth bluffing card game, if you’re looking for a duelling card game where reading your friends and bald-faced cunning is important, if you want to be a super cute thief or super dogged inspector, then Cat & The Mouse might be for you. Sound cool? You can get all of this for $10, here, on DriveThruRPG!
If you’d like a little more detail, though…
Cat & The Mouse is a game I want new designers to play, because I want them to see how simple ideas expand when you put work into them. I’ve been fascinated by stealth games for years now and it’s been a longstanding point of embarassment for me that video games are almost the only place that does them right. We all know tabletop sessions where the stealthy character has gone off, done some stealth, and come back, and either left everyone alone to wait for them or failed spectacularly without any friends. The question of how to do stealth well in tabletop games has been on my mind for ages, and Cat & The Mouse is the game that came to me as a bolt from the blue while walking the dog.
Rather than try and accommodate a dozen other elements, Cat & The Mouse boils the entire concept of the thief game into two elements: The thief, and the pursuer. If you’re an Inspector, you’re going to be told lies, basically every turn, and if you’re good, if you can read the thief, you might just spring the trap on them at the worst moment. If you’re the thief, you’re constantly putting forth an air of being in control and comfortable while privately shrieking as you try and work out where the last piece you need before you can escape. Cat & The Mouse is a game about tension and lies and giving away information and seeing if you can get away in time.
With that in mind, if you like the sound of it, or the style – consider buying it!