At this point, there are a lot of trick taking games in the world. It’s kind of comforting to pick up a new one, and already know most of the rules. “This is a trick taking game, but here’s the twist…” and then bam, you’re off to the races. Maybe you’re trying to avoid taking the prince suit in Rebel Princess, or there’s a whole flowchart of special characters that beat one another in Skull King. Either way, trick taking games can be counted on to be taught extremely quickly, which means you’ll go from opening the rulebook to actually playing the game in mere moments.

That familiarity is part of the genre’s appeal. Trick-taking games feel communal in a way few other mechanisms do. Everyone comes to the table with a shared vocabulary: follow suit, trump, void, lead. Because of that, designers can afford to get weird. They can bend expectations, twist assumptions, and trust that players will roll with it rather than get lost in the weeds. When a trick-taking game introduces a new hook, it often lands immediately because the foundation is already there.

Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition, designed by Muneyuki Yokouchi and published by Bezier Games, is a trick-taking game where none of the cards have a suit until they’re “observed,” or played. Every card is black and white, so players must declare the card’s suit when it’s played. That single idea alone feels clever, but the real trick is that there are five of each card value in the deck, but only four suits in the game. So you really need to hope that no one is going to play the red 4 when you were counting on your 4 to be red, as that might just force you into a nasty paradox.

That tension between possibility and inevitability is where Cat in the Box really lives. At the start of a hand, everything feels wide open. Your cards could be anything, heck, they are everything. But as suits get claimed and the shared board fills up, the future begins to harden in uncomfortable ways. What felt like flexibility suddenly becomes constraint. You’re not just playing your hand anymore, you’re trying to weave in-between your opponents cards, trying to sneak in one last play before the proverbial door slams shut.

A paradox occurs when none of the cards in a player’s hand can legally be played. Thankfully there’s a dual layer board that you put your own coloured token onto whoever you play, a card that tracks all the cards that have been played so far. Also, having tokens connect on that board are what earn you points at the end of a round. I find the board that tracks the cards that have been played to be the most helpful thing. Granted, this would be a very difficult game to play without it, but as someone who struggles to remember which cards have already been played, I really appreciate its existence, to the point where I wish every trick taking game I play would have one.

And that board is not just functional, but it actively shapes how you think and visualize the game. Instead of relying entirely on memory, you’re constantly scanning the board, reading the patterns, and watching where other players are committing themselves. The board turns the abstract concept of “what numbers and suits are left” into a tangible and spatial arena. You can see the risk accumulating, sometimes literally clustering on one half of the board.

The concept of declaring your suit is one that’s tough to wrap your brain around in theory, but once you have the cards in your hand, and you start playing, it’s surprisingly natural. The trick really comes in knowing when to call yourself void in a suit to play the red trump suit, and how to maintain your own strategic tempo going forward. Sometimes a gambit pays off, sometimes the other colours fill up much faster than you were expecting, and before you know it, the only cards you have left have to be blue, and you told everyone you were out of blue 3 turns ago.

Those moments are equal parts satisfying and horrifying. When a plan comes together, it feels brilliant. When it collapses, it’s usually because of a decision you made much earlier, when the consequences weren’t yet obvious. Cat in the Box is very good at making you feel responsible for your own downfall. In other games I’d blame the bad hand of cards I was dealt, but here, I have no one to blame but myself.

Players earn points in 2 ways. Firstly, you earn one point per trick that you’ve won. Easy, straightforward. Unless you caused the paradox, then it’s -1 point for every trick you won. Whoops! The other way to earn points is via token adjacency on the main board. At the start of each round, after looking at your cards, you need to bid on the number of tricks you think you’re going to win. If you’re successful in your bid, you earn one point for every token in the largest group of adjacently connected tokens. Earning that you get to score those bonus points from token adjacency scoring is a huge benefit, and properly maximizing those points can easily swing the game on its own. What I like here is how the bidding doesn’t feel bolted on. It integrates naturally with the spatial puzzle on the board and gives players a clear incentive to take risks.

Making your bid and scoring your adjacent tokens can be a real boon, but it can be really tricky to accomplish, as the round ends immediately when someone triggers the paradox. This can be supremely frustrating for the other players too. If you managed to collect your tokens all together, but someone causes a paradox one turn before you’re able to win the last trick needed to satisfy your bid. It creates an exciting moment of tension. Speaking of tension, each hand has a really great arc, as cards get played, the options available to you quickly diminish. When everyone is holding only two or three cards left, it feels like a standoff. Whose going to be the one to fail, is the person who goes right before you going to take the last 3 spot?

Cat in the Box is a fantastic subversion of the trick taking mechanism that gets players excited. It’s novel, interesting, and strategic, which each play leaving you thinking about how you could have done better. The production by Bezier games is no slouch either. The dual layered board keeps all the tokens in the right spots, the player tokens themselves are brightly coloured, translucent, and screen printed to showcase a different science-y thing, which just makes this production extra charming.

The novel subversion of the trick taking mechanism is the most interesting part of Cat in the Box, which means players who don’t have a lot of experience with trick taking games won’t appreciate the whimsy the game is presenting. It’s for this reason that I wouldn’t recommend breaking it out amongst trick taking newbies. But for the groups that have a few different trick taking games under their belts, then Cat in the Box is a delightfully fun surprise.