I’ve started adding “Board Game Review” to the title of my posts to make it easier for me to schedule my posts according to my schedule, and because it’s surprisingly helpful with SEO, but I feel weird doing it when I’m reviewing a game that is just cards, like Too Many Poops.
I think I should start with the story of how this game entered my collection. My wife was out of town with her friend, and the two of them love to go thrift store shopping. Often, it’s more the hunt that they enjoy, over anything that they actually find, but recently she brought me home a present. A shrink-wrapped copy of Too Many Poops, solely because she knows I love games, and cats. A perfect gift, no?
To play Too Many Poops, players are dealt 2 cat cards and 2 tool cards. A pet shop is established in the centre of the table with 3 cats and 3 tools face up. To begin, all players pick one cat from their hand and plays it face up in front of them to establish their “house”.
On your turn, you must play at a cat card from your hand to your own house, your opponent’s house, or to the ‘wild’, which is just an oversized green card off to the side. After playing one cat, you may play up to two tool cards, and resolve their effects accordingly.
At the end of your turn, draw cards from the pet shop until your hand is back up to 6 cards, and add one poop for every cat in your house to your litter box. Players take turns one after another until one player has achieved 10 points to become the winner. Each cat is worth 1 point, but if you have cats of the same colour in your house, those cats are worth double. However, if you have two rival cats in your house, they’re flipped over to their colourless side and are worth 0 points. If your litter box ever has 10 poops at the end of your turn, then you’ve become overwhelmed with poops, and you’re eliminated from the game.
The first thing I noticed about Too Many Poops was the presence of pooples. Little wooden poop tokens. The next thing I noticed was that the rest of the production was pretty lush for a simple little card game. Each player gets a dual layered tile for their litter box, and a couple of the cards were iridescent. These rainbow cats have no rivals, and can belong to any colour. As a nice touch, the game also comes with non-foil versions of these cats, if you find their sheen distasteful. Another nice touch, they included a full set of rainbow cats, but with the names blanked, so you can add your own felines to the mix.
Playing the game is pretty simple, much along the lines of the incredibly popular Exploding Kittens. You play a cat to yourself to earn more points, or if you happen to have a rival for a cat in your opponent’s house, you can stymie their efforts. The tool cards are fairly varied, with effects that happen right away, or persist throughout the game, along with giving and stealing cats. There’s a lot of directly interacting or messing with your opponents, Nothing you have is safe.
When playing with larger player counts, the game descends into chaos. As more cats are on the table, more people taking turns and playing cats in between every one of your turns, the likelihood of your rival cat being foisted upon you gets exponentially higher. And with more cats in your house means more poops to have to clean up.
This was actually the part of Too Many Poops that I found the most interesting. The more cats you have, the more poops you generate, the more of the tools you take and use are spent mitigating your poop generating engine. It can feel like walking on a tightrope as you balance bringing more cats into your house for the points, but also needing to deal with the waste. That said, if you just so happen to get screwed on the tool cards a couple rounds in a row, there isn’t anything you can do to mitigate it. And other players can’t really affect the cards available to you, except via hate-drafting, and even then they’ll take the tool you wanted, only to have a similar one get revealed on the flop.
Too Many Poops was better than I expected it to be, but that’s hardly praise, as my expectations were in the basement. For fans of Exploding Kittens, Unstable Unicorn, or just cats in general, Too Many Poops offers a fast, chaotic, combative experience with a touch of set collection. It’s not a bad game by any stretch, but it’s best enjoyed with children who giggle every time you say poop. I won’t be bringing this out to my serious game group, but if you have a group who enjoy these kinds of take-that card games, Too Many Poops could be a hit!
