Cat & Chocolate

 

Cat & Chocolate is a game from Japan first published in 2010. It is an award winner in Japan. This is a party game and it is of the type where you need to be a convincing speaker. This is partly a social deduction game. Players are divided into two teams. You know which team you belong to, but you have no idea who your teammates are. When the game ends, your team identities are revealed, and each team adds up their points to see who wins. What this means is throughout the game you want to do your best to score points, because that will help, regardless of which team you are on. 

Every round, one player will be the storyteller, and the others the judges. As the storyteller, you reveal one situation card from the deck, and you must play one, two or three item cards from your hand which can be used to resolve the situation. You have a hand of only three cards. Your job is to convince everyone that the item or items you play will help you get out that particular difficult situation. After you explain, everyone else votes and this determines whether you score one point. The game keeps going like this, until the game end card turns up. The game end card is inserted roughly in the middle of the deck before the game starts. 

The two factions, and some of the situations

The scenarios are all horror movie type situations. Everything happens in an old mysterious mansion. You have ghosts, monsters, zombies and so on. In most cases you are simply trying to survive an attack. 

When we played, the key question asked by Alex was how were we going to know who was on which team. There is nothing in the rules or game components which will help the players determine who is on which team. It is all up to the players themselves. You can tell others which team you are on. You can lie about it too. This part of the game has unreliable fun, and by that I mean whether it is fun depends a lot on the players. It can be fun, and it might also be boring. In my opinion the designer should do a bit more work to make the fun more reliable. 

If through discussion you manage to figure out who is friend and who is foe, the storytelling part of the game may become pointless. You should always vote yes for your teammates, and no for your opponents. I feel the intention of the designer is you should not figure out your teams during the game. It is only meant for the end-game revelation. 

The game is disappointing to me, especially since this was an award winner. However this was back in 2010, and at that time there probably weren't that many modern games designed in Japan in the first place. Japanese game design certainly has come a long way since then. Cat & Chocolate is that type of party game which depends on the creativity and expressiveness of the players. The kind with performances and judges. Not really my cup of tea. Also the design feels a little dated, now that I have seen many better Japanese games.