BOOoop

Deceptively cute, quietly vicious.

A quilted bed, a pile of small wooden cats, and one of the most elegant nasty little rules in modern board gaming. Place a kitten and it goes boop — shoving every adjacent piece one space away, including the ones you spent the last three turns arranging.

Line up three kittens and they graduate into cats. Line up three cats and you win. Cats can boop kittens, but kittens can't boop cats, so partway through a hierarchy appears and completely rewrites what a safe position looks like. This Halloween edition adds Ghost Cats, which sit on the stitching between spaces rather than in them and boop in straight lines regardless of whose pieces they are — one more thing to watch in a game that already punishes you for looking away.

Perfect for: Two-player households, and anyone who enjoys handing an opponent something adorable and then watching the moment they work out what they've agreed to.

2 players | 20–30 minutes | Age 10+