Base price: $38.
1 – 5 players.
Play time: 15 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of Nekojima was provided by Hachette Boardgames / Unfriendly Games.
Cat tower time! Not that one; a different one. This time around you’re building towers for cats, not of cats. Much more OSHA-friendly, and even PETA can’t get mad about it. But I digress. I’ve always had a soft spot for dexterity games, and this is shaping up to be no exception. I think they get players excited about thinking about board games beyond just moving cubes around and getting tricked into doing math; they have that good implicit math that we’re good at doing sometimes where we figure out how balanced something is or how much the various elements of something weigh. It’s a lot of fun and only a little crazy, as most good things should be. Let’s see how it plays.
In Nekojima, you’re in charge of establishing an electrical network on one of the many legendary cat islands of Japan. You gotta have electricity to upload those cat photos, after all. Unfortunately, your job is not an easy one. The terrain of the island is fairly complex and complicated, and you’d really rather not build a tower on top of a cat’s home. They’re particular about that sort of thing. As you build, however, you find that your towers are just getting incorporated into the ecosystem, so that’s even more of an incentive to build them safely and effectively. Your towers will grow ever higher; how will you handle them?
Contents
Setup
Not a ton to set up. Set the poles aside, organized by color:
Place the cubes in the bag:
The boards can be set in the center:
Set the cats nearby as well:
The dice, too:
Pick a player to go first; you should be ready to start!
Gameplay
Pretty easy! You can play this one cooperative or competitively. Each turn, you roll both dice first. If any show a multicolor face, you can choose any color; if any show a dagger, the player to your right chooses for you. Those are the two districts you’ve been given (they can be the same district).
Then, draw a cube from the bag. Based on what color you get, grab a pole with a cable of the matching color. If you draw a black cube, pass it to another player to hold on to and draw again. If you’re playing cooperatively, you keep it instead.
Then, place the poles! The poles must be placed one in each of the two districts indicated by your dice. They can be placed on top of other poles, but you cannot touch the cables with your hands (electrocution!) and the cables cannot touch other cables or wrap completely around a pole. Also, don’t place the poles upside-down. Also, the poles and cables cannot go past the edge of the board.
Once you’ve done that, if you have a black cube, add a cat to one of the cables of the same color as the one you just placed. If it falls, place it back on the cable.
Play continues until either everything is placed (everyone wins) or any pole falls. In the latter case, the player who knocked the pole over loses and everyone else wins!
Player Count Differences
There aren’t a ton, either cooperative or competitive. The biggest difference is that with more players, you have options on who you can give the black cube to in competitive play; otherwise, at two, everything just goes to your opponent, which can feel a bit rote. In cooperative play, you’re really playing either you or not-you, so it doesn’t feel like it matters how many not-yous there are unless one of them is particularly bad at dexterity games. That could happen at any player count, though. The only thing I’ll mention is that the game does support team-based play, where each team of two places a pole together by each holding one end, and that sounds pretty fun / ridiculous. So if you’re looking for a weird time, maybe try playing with pairs?
Strategy
- If you’re picking districts for an opponent, feel free to be needlessly nasty. Which districts are overrun? Which have the most stuff in them already or the greatest height disparity with the other required district? If you look for those, you might be able to trap your opponent in a spot that they can’t necessarily get out of.
- Give cats to the player who’s doing the best. If they seem to be “good” at dexterity games (an inexact science if I’ve ever heard of one) then you can just keep passing them cats and hoping they mess up. It’s cruel, but, most dexterity games are.
- Keep in mind how long different cord lengths are; that can affect where you choose to place things. The cords are not all the same length; the color indicates how long they are. That might determine which poles can go where. Don’t try to use a cord that’s too short; you’ll just end up regretting it.
- You can’t wrap lines around the poles, but you can twist them a bit to your advantage. If the cord is too long, then it might drape or hit another cord on the poles. Twist the poles so that they’re not facing each other, in that case; it can give you a bit of extra structure so that the cords don’t drape as low.
- If you can’t build out or around, build up! You won’t be able to place poles forever on the ground level; you’ll eventually have to start stacking poles on poles. That’s not the worst thing in the world, but you need to be careful. The connection points between poles are great places for the poles to topple if you apply force in a way that you didn’t intend.
- At higher player counts, you may want to play the easier cats first and hope someone else messes up with the more challenging to place ones. At lower player counts, you might want to save the cats for yourself later on. With more players, it’s decently likely someone else will have to deal with the cats, so you can just place whatever’s easiest for you and move on. Hopefully you won’t get targeted again!
- Regardless, when it comes to cat placement, remember physics and fulcrums. The farther the cat is from either pole, the bigger the risk that it will tilt the pole down and cause the structure to collapse. If you don’t want that to happen, err towards placing cats on shorter lines (where you can) and place them closer to the pole more generally.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Love the theme! Cat islands! Electrical pole work! Two great things that are a lot of fun together. Haven’t had that much fun with electrical-themed stacking since Power On!. Kind of a specific genre, I suppose.
- Stacking the poles on top of each other can make for a very striking display. It looks super good when it’s all stacked up! We actually had the game fully complete and stacked over the weekend; it looked amazing. We can’t show it to you because we did knock it over; you’ll have to take my word for it.
- Additionally, the connected elements of the poles can make the game more complicated. It’s a fun extra bit of challenge because you’re not just placing one element; you’re placing two connected ones! Balance and structure are paramount when you’re getting set up.
- The cats are fun to hang on the power lines! Reminds me of Rhino Hero: Super Battle. I think I wish they were a bit easier to hang, just in terms of sighting where you could place them, but it’s a small distinction.
- The board is really nicely made and colorful. It’s got a great thickness and weight, and you need a flat and consistent surface to stack the poles on, so it’s perfect. I also really like the art on the board. It looks great.
- I appreciate the interaction as well; having other players choose which district you’re stuck with or make you place cats on your turn is a nice bit of intensity. It gives you a bit more to do than just leer at a player when it’s not your turn. You need to add a bit of spice to it! Being able to choose who gets what (with the appropriate rolls or card draws) adds a bit of that excitement.
Mehs
- The cube board doesn’t really seem like it serves a purpose beyond “you got to a higher level” cooperatively. It does just about nothing in a competitive game. I’m not entirely sure what it’s … for? It’s not bad, having a place to store the cubes, but why do four cubes equal a level? What do the levels mean?
Cons
- The game’s not as needlessly complicated as I hoped, which is fine, but I would have loved something insidious like Catch the Moon again. I just love very complex dexterity games that are weird and complicated and rely on skilled placement. This isn’t too bad but I’d love to see what messy stuff that they could come up with to make it more wild.
Overall: 7.75 / 10
Overall, I think Nekojima is pretty fun! I think I would love to see an expansion that adds an extra layer of complexity or challenge, but I will say if you’re not careful, the game can be over pretty quickly. I never quite love “everyone else wins” outcomes, but it’s pretty much the best you can do for any dexterity stacking game that doesn’t provide points of some kind. This puts Nekojima pretty firmly in the family games category, for me, but that’s not bad at all! It’s quite entertaining, especially for folks who are huge cat people (like me). From a product standpoint, it’s also quite nice: the dice are cute, the board is colorful and dynamic, and the actual components have a nice weight and construction to them. The pole-stacking elements are something I haven’t really seen since something like Villa Paletti, but that’s still a very different game, so Nekojima feels like it occupies its own section of the game space without overlapping with too much else. I still don’t really understand the point of tracking what cubes you place beyond a personal challenge or a sense of how many cubes are left, but I don’t think it matters that much in the grand scheme of things. It’s a fun dexterity game that I haven’t seen before, and I’m generally inclined to give pretty good marks to that kind of thing. If you’re looking for a solid family dexterity title, you want to experiment with power lines but none of the danger, or you just like the concept of a cat island, Nekojima might be right up your alley! I’ve certainly had fun with it.
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