The Express Blog: I predict twelve dead cats!

Please note: no animals were harmed in the writing of this blog.

I'm briefly interrupting what's left of my vacation to write you a little note in a new form: the Express Blog! In these posts, I'll be less verbose than usual (I'll try, at least, I promise!) and I'll tell you about simple games that can be explained in five minutes and that can be easily played with family or during an evening with friends.

If, like me, you own two cats to whom you are allergic, you will probably find a malicious pleasure in imagining them in a small box. Alive? Dead? Who knows, as long as the box is closed, one cannot say. For my part, as a Reactine addict, I prefer to imagine the box empty! POOF! No more cats!

I am of course talking about the game Ton chat Schrödinger, mort ou vif ? a French reissue of a bluffing and deduction game initially published in 2015.

Inspired by Schrödinger's experiment on quantum physics, it's a small game for 2 to 6 players that can be played in 20 minutes. The goal? Be the last player left in the game! How to achieve this? By clever deductions and a bit of bluffing!

How does it work?

Ton chat Schrödinger, mort ou vif ? consists of about fifty cards representing boxes: some contain a pretty, very much alive kitty, others a pretty, deceased kitty, while others are empty.

The game is played in several rounds at the end of which one player will be eliminated.

At the beginning of the round, each player is dealt a certain number of cards. In turn, players must make predictions: based on the contents of their hand, each player must try to guess how many dead/alive cats/empty boxes are in play during this round. And since you always have to make a higher prediction than the previous player, it becomes increasingly risky to predict anything!

To avoid making a prediction, you can challenge a player's prediction, which ends the round. Mother-in-law just predicted eleven live cats? Bullshit! Let's see what happens! When a prediction is challenged, all players show their cards and the prediction is validated. If the prediction is correct (there are at least as many live/dead/empty boxes as predicted) then the contesting player is eliminated. However, if the prediction is wrong, the player who made the prediction is eliminated! We then start a new round, with one less player (and one less card in our hand). As the game progresses, there are fewer players and fewer cards in play; the rounds are therefore increasingly shorter (which is nice for those who are eliminated first).

The last player surviving wins the game!

Basically, that's it! There are one or two little things that I forgot to tell you and that you will discover with the game: wild boxes, Physi-Cats that give you a unique power that can be used once per game, the possibility of changing some of your cards...

So… what do we think (expressly)?

I tested this game with my family (with children aged 11 and 16) on a rainy day at the cottage and we were able to play several games in a row (20 minutes is a big maximum, ours took between 10 and 15 minutes at the most). Everyone found it really funny and enjoyed it.

It is not a highly cerebral or strategic game and, precisely for this reason, it will adapt perfectly to a wide audience and to more festive moments (we say 10 years and up, but I am sure that from 8 years old it is easy to do!) Despite everything, it requires just enough reflection and deduction to be enjoyable and, with the Physi-Cats (which we can choose to integrate or not in the games), just enough variety so that we can replay many times without getting bored.

There is still a bit of luck (I know that some people don't like it) and sometimes you find yourself trapped with the obligation to make a prediction that everyone knows is wrong. But since the game only lasts ten minutes, there's really no need to get angry!

As with all bluffing and deduction games, it really gets more fun when you play with more players. The game is designed for 2 to 6 players, but I really recommend 4 to 6 (otherwise, the games are really too short!)

Ton chat Schrödinger, mort ou vif ? 

A game by Chris and Heather O'Neill and Adriel Lee Wilson, illustrated by James Stowe

Edited in French by Kikigagne?

2-6 players

10 years and over

10-20 minutes per game