Rat-A-Tat Cat is another winner from Gamewright based on the classic Golf. If you’re not familiar with Golf, it’s a memory game played with cards in which you are working to get the lowest score.
How to play
After shuffling, every player is dealt four cards facedown. They are allowed to look at only two of them immediately, but not after their first look. The rest of the deck is placed in the middle, with the top card faceup in a discard pile.
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Each turn, draw one card. You can either draw from the draw pile (face down; unknown) or from the discard pile (face up; known). Without looking at any of your facedown cards in front of you, decide which you’ll replace with your new card (if any; you can also discard the same card). Make the change, and place your replaced card in the discard pile face up.
When you think you have the lowest score, knock on the table and say, “Rat-a-Tat Cat” at the end of your turn. Every other player then has one last turn before the round is over. The lowest score wins the round.
How Rat-A-Tat Cat is different from Golf
In Golf, a regulation deck of poker cards is used. Rat-A-Tat Cat, however, has pictures to help you remember and keep track of your cards. Cats are good (lower scores), and rats are bad (higher scores), so you want to get rid of your rats. What I didn’t notice until laying all the cards out for their picture was that the change is made gradually. Middle cards will have both cats and rats on them.
Rat-A-Tat Cat also has a few extra cards. Peek allows you to peek at one of your cards. Draw 2 allows you to take up to two more turns in a row. Swap allows you to swap any of your cards with any of an opponent’s, however, you don’t get to look at any of the cards before you swap them.
Overall, Rat-A-Tat Cat is a fun card game that I’m glad we have, but I also found it cheap at a thrift store. For my family, it’s not worth paying full price for the game when we can just play Golf with a regular deck of cards.