Magic Cat 2014

To win in Magic Cat, you need to complete potions and you need to do it quickly — sort of.

Each player starts the game with an empty potion bottle and a magic spell card, while all of the ingredients, other potion bottles, magic potion tiles and curse tiles are shuffled together face down, then placed in four stacks, with the top of tile of three stacks being turned face up.

One player starts as the first magician and says a spell of some kind starting with the word "Start" and ending with whatever she wants to say, e.g., "(werewolf howl)". The other players, in any order, try to say "First (werewolf howl)", "Second (werewolf howl)", etc., but they can't say something at the same time as another player; if they do, or if someone says that wrong thing, then the round ends and those magicians receive a curse token worth -1 point.

As magicians answer correctly, they throw their magic spell cards into the box in the center of the table. Once the round ends, in the order that they threw their cards in the box they claim one ingredient from a stack, revealing the next ingredient if they took a face-up tile. If someone reveals a curse tile, then she must take that, too.

When two stacks are empty or all of the curse tokens have been taken, the game ends. Players then score 3, 7 or 10 points for their completed potions (which take 3-5 ingredients), 1 point for each magic potion, and -1 for each curse (with an additional -4 points for whoever has the most). Whoever has the high score wins.