Advert: We received a loaned copy of the game from Stami Games via the UK Board Game Review Circle. This is a prototype so components and gameplay are subject to change. All opinions are ours and our reviews are always honest.

Ever mew-sed about launching your own cat cafe business? Well, we have the purrrr-fect game for you!

👥 1 to 5 players
⌛ 60 to 90 minutes
🧠 10 years+

Gameplay overview:

In Cozy Cat Cafe, players are competing to make the best, coziest cat cafe in town! Players spend cookies to adopt cats, buy furniture, and place them in their cafe to create the most ambience and attract the best customers. 

Each turn you can take one action to either adopt one cat (costs cookies), buy furniture (as much as you like), invite a customer to your cafe, or take a coin or cookie. Cats and furniture have to be placed straight away, their orientation is fixed (they can’t be rotated or flipped like in many other polyomino games) and they can’t be moved after placement.

You’re aiming to place the cats and furniture so that they meet the placement requirements on customer cards in the queue, which show one (or more!) cats that need to be placed adjacent to one (or more!) piece of furniture. Some customer cards include a specific placement of a cat next to furniture (i.e. what side of the furniture the cat needs to touch). While you don’t need to meet this exact requirement to invite the customer in, if you do match it, you can flip the furniture to show the more ambient side, which awards you points at the end of the game.

When you invite customers into the cafe, you instantly gain the coin value on their card (the money they’re spending in your cafe!). Each customer also has points they are worth at the end of the game. Some customers are trickier to please, but they are the biggest spenders!

Everytime you adopt a cat, you draw a Cat Trick card – these are nifty little tricks you can play for free on your turn, as long as a cat in your cafe matches the card type. The four types of cats/tricks all work in slightly different ways:

• Relaxed cat cards involve discarding other Cat Tricks for financial gain or stealing Cat Tricks from other players.

• Adventurous cat cards are helpful for adopting cats (gaining cookies) or manipulating the available customers by swapping in from the discard pile.

• Playful cat cards are more random and include gaining money, peeking at opponents’ Cat Tricks or moving cats in your own cafe.

• Mischievous cats are more cheeky and cause trouble for others by stealing money, forcing others to discard Cat Tricks, moving an opponent’s cat in their cafe or refreshing the customer queue.

Instead of taking a normal action you can choose to replenish your Cat Tricks by discarding as many as you like, then drawing back up so your hand is equal to the number of cats currently in your cafe. 

After 9 turns the round ends! There are three rounds, each with their own goal tile cutely listed under Today’s Specials. At the end of each round, the current goal tile is awarded to the player that meets its requirement, the queuing customers are replaced with new ones from the deck and the next round begins!

At the end of the game, the player with the most points from customers, cats, ambient furniture, goal tiles and leftover coins wins the game!

So, will your cafe be the cat’s paw-jamas, or will it be a cat-astrophe?

Solo mode

Cozy Cat Cafe does include a solo mode, but we didn’t have a chance to try it out. Set-up and gameplay is similar to 2-player mode, but instead of a second player board there is a ‘Botlet’ deck that describes the different actions the Botlet takes on its turn. 

Our first impressions:

We litter-ally loved this game! The components and aesthetics of this game are as adorable and cozy as you could possibly wish for, and the cats are soooo cute. Thematically, it feels more like you’re setting up a cafe rather than running one, because you’re adding furniture and cats rather than serving customers – although you do invite customers in and they give you money. This isn’t a criticism at all, just something we thought was interesting.

We litter-ally loved this game! The components and aesthetics of this game are as adorable and cozy as you could possibly wish for, and the cats are soooo cute.

The game production is amazing and is very well thought out. I love the little touches that really bring out the theme, like the goal tiles being ‘Today’s Specials’ on the main board. The main board also has special spaces for the cat cookies (a cookie bowl!) and the coins (a money tray!). And the plant tiles that go in your cafe during set-up (placed by your opponent to try and make things trickier) have a different design on each side – it’s absolutely inconsequential to the gameplay, but I loved feeling like I was personalising my own cafe space. The only thing that could be improved are the customer cards – we felt they were a little impersonal because while they have names, they don’t have faces. Adding some customer characters onto the cards would make them feel more like real visitors to your cafe.

Cozy by name, cozy by nature! The rules are simple and the cozy vibes definitely carry through to the gameplay, especially when you’re placing new cats and furniture in your cafe to get the perfect arrangements – it’s very satisfying.

But wait – these cats have claws! Beneath that cozy exterior is a little bite to the game that might take you by surprise. There are a few Cat Tricks that let you mess with other players, like moving their cats around – this feels particularly mean as you can really mess up their plans for the round! This is the first cozy polyomino tile laying we’ve played that has a bit of ‘take that’ card play. Once we knew it was a possibility, we enjoyed it. But some cozy gamers might not be as keen on being mean.

But wait – these cats have claws! Beneath that cozy exterior is a little bite to the game that might take you by surprise.

The game has 4 different cat types that can appeal to different play styles. You might not get to fully pick a strategy based on your preferred cat style because the customer queue will heavily impact which cats you want to adopt – but you can usually get some of them in your cafe to play the tricks you want, like grabbing a mischievous cat so you can be a mischievous meanie. I did find the relaxed cat cards the least useful: you need to discard other Cat Tricks to use them, and you only draw a Cat Trick when you adopt a cat so you don’t often have a lot of extras in you hand. But it might just be down to my play style – Matt was better at using relaxed cats than me (although he did lose the games…). And we did get more Cat Trick cards when we made more use of the hand refresh action after populating our cafe with a few cats first (the number of cats is how many you can draw back up).

You know I love a good rulebook, and this has a good, clear rulebook. I like that it gives a high level overview first and then goes into more detail (i.e. getting into the nitty gritty of specific actions) after. I also really like that they give a little taste of what each cat type (and their tricks) are like, so you can get an idea of which you might prefer to aim for, even for your first game. 

We only played 2-player, but I can imagine there’s a change in dynamic and a bit more mischievousness when there’s more people competing for the queuing customers and playing Cat Tricks on each other!

Finally, Matt doesn’t like the insert and would rather have baggies – takes more time to put away because everything goes in a specific place versus quickly throwing everything into baggies. I do like the insert, but would like to see a what goes where guide e.g. on the side of the box base like Wingspan.

Final thoughts:

From cute cats to puzzly gameplay, Cozy Cat Cafe is absolutely claw-some!

From cute cats to puzzly gameplay, Cozy Cat Cafe is absolutely claw-some! The juxtaposition between the cozy tile laying element and the slightly antagonistic take-that element is initially surprising, but it gives Cozy Cat Cafe an engaging edge that pushes it beyond the multiplayer solitaire that a lot of other tile laying games offer. We were really impressed with the design and production quality of this prototype and we’re looking forward to seeing the final game in action.