There was a period of time when it felt like every board game coming out featured medieval austere white men staring over a city, kingdom, or grimly staring at you from the box cover. It was around that time when I started really getting into board games, so the theme of ‘trading in the Mediterranean’ became fairly synonymous with board games in my head.
Thankfully the hobby at large has moved on from that trend, and now we get more whimsical and fantastic themes, such as the one you’ll find in First Rat. You are controlling a colony of rats who have set their sights on landing on the cheese moon. You’ll collect resources to construct rocket parts, grow more members of your colony, read comic books to attain superpowers, collect bottle caps and energy drinks, train to be rastronauts, and more.
The gameplay is straightforward. On your turn you can either move one of your rats up to 5 spaces, then collect the resource from the space you landed on, or, you can more 2-4 of your rats up to 3 spaces each (provided they all land on the same colour) and collect resources from all the rats that moved. That’s basically it. There are a couple shops along the way selling useful items that you can either pay for with cheese, or, steal for no cheese, but the thieving rat gets punted back to the start space.
As you collect goods, you trade them in for rocket parts, which just has you placing cubes on tracks to earn end game points. The same goes for the apple core track, the light track, the rastronaut track. Once one player had placed 8 of their score cubes, or all 4 of their rats reach the top of the track, the game concludes, and the rat family with the most points is crowned the winner
I’ll be honest, I kind of love First Rat. First, the theme is whimsical and brilliant, and I adore telling people the story of what’s going on. The board is adorned with all kinds of charming details, like the cockroach thugs guarding the entrance to the shortcuts, or inserting the special personas onto the tails of the rats. There’s a lot of charm to this game. Then the game has a really satisfying growth to it, as more and more rats enter the tracks and the rats manage to get further along to the really powerful spots, players go from earning a measly 2 cheese per round to pulling in absolute ludicrous numbers of goods in a single round.
First Rat is a race in every respect. The first player to do anything gets the most benefits. The first to reach the shops gets first pick, the first player to find the comic book stash gets the first pic, the first player to turn in goods gets the most points. In that same respect, there’s tremendous value in being able to do multiple things first, as if you specialize in a single thing, you’ll be receiving diminishing returns. In our most recent game I had a banger of a turn, landing 3 rats on orange tiles, complete with backpack and lightbulb bonuses to get 7 goods, then used a soda can to double my total yield, and cashed in all those resources to get 2 cockpits and a thruster, which completed a full shuttle. A single turn, placing 4 cubes sounds amazing, doesn’t it? The downside was that I wasn’t first in any of those categories, making the average score of each cube just 6 points. The player who won, managed to be first on a couple tracks and got their rastronaut to the end of the track and won with a whopping 92 points over my 67.
On the flip side of the board, all the tracks are blank, which allow you to randomize the spaces and the values for accomplishing each of the tasks in the game, which can vary wildly. There are slightly more backpacks and comic books in the game than is required, meaning you won’t always have the same set of special powers each game, but those are minor to the experience. Every game will ultimately feel the same, run your rats up the tracks, amass resources, trade those in for points.
That being said, First Rat is a really satisfying engine building game. I love the trade-off of choosing which rat(s) to move, deciding between activating one space that you need right now, and activating 3 spaces for a bigger, but less urgent benefit. I like the concept of stealing from the stores to reset your rat back to the start of the race, which may or may not be very beneficial to you. I like everything about First Rat, it’s just a satisfying game to play. But at the same time, it doesn’t light my world on fire, nor does it beckon for me to return to it again and again. I think the real strength lies in its whimsical theme, plus it’s light and satisfying gameplay. It’s a game I won’t hesitate to suggest if I’m in a group of people whom I don’t game with often, as it’s a pretty inoffensive. There’s not too much you can do to cause bad feelings amongst your peers, and when you win or lose, it’s not because of randomness or luck. You can generally pinpoint what you did wrong and figure out how to play better next time.
You might be able to tell from my tone that I don’t really know where I come down on First Rat at the end of the day. I really like, I know I do. But the more I think about it, the more criticism I can draw. And I think I’m okay with that. It’s a great little game that’s fun to play. Not every game needs to be a lifestyle game, nor does every game need to be a desert island game. First Rat is a great game that you can play with almost anyone and have a good time. While it’s not something that I’m going to write a strategy guide on, nor will I spend a lot of time dwelling on the design or decisions the game presents, I’m still really happy each time I get to play First Rat. And that’s what I’m really looking for in a game. One that lets me have fun!
