Description

The Waltzing Cat is a two-player game that consists of eleven wooden blocks, with each of those blocks depicting two differently-colored cats on opposite sides. Gold cats show up five times, red and blue four times, and white, black and green three times; no color is repeated on a block with another color that appears the same number of times, e.g., red doesn't share a block with red or blue, but it does with the other four colors.

To set up, shuffle the blocks without looking at them, then set them up so that each player can see only one side of each block. The player who sees more gold cats takes the first turn. On a turn, a player pushes a block away from them (so that it falls on the table), pulls a block toward them, or declares the end of the game. If you push a block and the face that lands facing up appears on another face-up block, then you keep the block that you just pushed over. If you pull a block — thereby revealing a face that you haven't seen — and the face that lands facing up appears on another face-up block, then you keep both matching blocks.

If you declare the end of the game, the other player takes turns either pushing or pulling blocks (claiming blocks when appropriate) until no further matches can be made; the player who claimed the end of the game then takes all remaining face-up blocks.

Players then tally their scores for the face-up cats in their collection. Each gold cat is worth 2 points, while each non-gold cat is worth 1 point. A pair of one blue and one red cat is worth an additional 3 points (for 5 total points). Whoever scores the most points wins!