I’m always a fan of games that help my kids slow down and think critically. So when HABA, (one of my favorite publishers of kid and family games!) puts out a deduction game, you know we’re going to check it out!

How Do You Play Cloaked Cats?

Players take on the roles of cats at a masquerade party, each trying to unmask the others before their own identity is revealed. 

To start the game, everyone receives three trait cards that they’ll put into their fans, along with a hand of three cat cards. Each cat card features a single cat with a few of the possible features. These can range from the pose the cat is in, the color of the cat, the presence or absence of stripes or spots, or whether or not the cat has an accessory (yarn, martini glass, hat, or mouse) All in all there are 19 possible features.

On your turn, you’ll play one of your three cat cards into the center of the table. Then, all players, including yourself, will place a mask in their player color on the cat card if that cat has one of their three hidden traits. After the masks are played, the active player has the choice to guess a hidden trait of an opponent. If they guess correctly, that player gives them one of their masks and reveals their correctly guessed trait. If they guess wrong, they give one of their masks to that player. Then the player draws another cat card and the active player passes to the next.

The game continues in this manner until a player has had all three of their traits revealed. Then the player who was able to deduce the most information from the other players wins.

What Do We Think?

As fans of puzzle deduction games, Cloaked Cats really hit the mark! 

I think Cloaked Cats is a great game for kids; really helps them work on their ability to assess the information they have available and determine what they both know and don’t know about each player’s hidden identities. 

It’s also great that the active player still has to place a mask when they place a card. This means that players need to think critically about which of their cards they put out. Perhaps they want to place their card with the jumping cat to confirm the an opponent has that trait, but doing so would mean they’d have to place a mask because the cat also has stripes. While you want to gather as much information as you can, you don’t want to reveal too much about yourself in the process. This is a great mental challenge for kids to work through and really powers up those critical thinking skills. 

There’s nothing quite so satisfying as accurately deducing the identities of your opponents. Our kids get such a thrill from being able to do this and I love that Cloaked Cats is simple enough to allow them to do it 100% on their own. 

Placing the masks on the cards played to the center of the table is a great way to keep all information available for players to reference during the game. I love watching the kids go back and look at the first few cards that a player played on and check it against what was recently played. It also helps me as a parent really encourage my kid to discover their own answers through deduction. If they seem stuck, I just remind them to go back and look at the cards to see if there’s anything they can narrow in on.

While the game isn’t quite as challenging for adults, it’s still a fun game to play together as a family and I love that it allows kids the autonomy to play on their own. Our 6 year old fully grasps the game and can deduce answers nearly as fast as we can and our 4 year old isn’t that far off!

In a lot of ways this game reminds me of another of our favorite deduction games for kids, Dinosaur Tea Party. However, Cloaked Cats does a slightly better job of providing a streamlined game that is far less fiddly and plays slightly quicker too! We typically are able to play two games back to back of Cloaked Cats in about 30 minutes total without losing any of the kids’ interests. 

Summary

Cloaked Cats is an adorable deduction game the whole family can enjoy playing together. With charming art and accessible rules, players as young as 5 or 6 can enjoy deducing the identity of their fellow players at the masquerade ball as they practice critical thinking skills and hone their powers of deduction. 

You can purchase a copy of Cloaked Cats on Amazon.
Find all of our favorite games on our Amazon Storefront.

A special thank you to our friends at HABA for sending us a copy of cloaked cats for review. As always, our thoughts and opinions are our own.

Game Info:
Title: Cloaked Cats
2-4 Players Ages 7+
Designer: Connor Reid
Artist: Pablo Fontagnier
Publisher: HABA

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Dinosaur Tea Party
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