Skilled gestures required
🍀 A bit of luck
Be evil to your opponents
It's more about not loosing rather than winning
🔄 Multiple game modes

🎂7+ 👥1-5 ⌛15'-30'

Nekojima is a game mostly made of wood. The design and the objects are both really nice.
The theme is a bit weird though : it's about bringing electricity into several districts of the island of cats, but hey why not ?

The game always follows the same pattern :
1. Throw the dices, they tell you in which of the 4 districts you got to put your electric poles.
2. Draw a wood cube from the bag to know which is the color of the pole you've to build and keep it next to you.
3. Try to put your electric poles as the game asked. If you succeed without making the whole structure fall, you put your little wood cube onto the board-measuring-the-difficulty-level, and your turn is over.
4. The one making the structure fall loses !

That's basically how you play, but there's a few more things you got to know before you start...

They always come as a pair, linked by a colored wire. They come in various sizes and you can choose the pair you want among those available from the color you picked. However the color of the wires is an indicator of their length (red is small, white is medium, and blue is the longest). When you set them up on the districts board, you can stack them on top of each other, but you always got to take care of the followings :
- wires can't touch each other, neither they can touch a pole
- wires can't touch the ground either, nor go outside of the districts board
- you got to hold the poles, not the wires : touching them with your bare hands would kill you !

They match the wires colors : red, white, blue and black.
"WAIT, WHAT ? You never spoke about black wires ?!"
Yeah, true dat, but I told you about the cats right ? These furry balls like to act crazy on the cables. So when you draw a black cube, that's a "gift" you can make to an opponent of yours. After his/her next turn, (s)he'll also have to hang a cat on a cable. Trust me, it can become a nightmare very fast.

They match the districts colors (red, purple, blue and green). But a dice got 6 faces, right ? The two last faces are either a chance or a jinx : one lets you decide of the district you'll play into, the other one leaves this choice to an opponent of yours...

Well, at first, there's the way you want to play.
Either as competitive game, either as a cooperative one (then the goal is to reach the highest score on the board-measuring-the-difficulty-level), or even in team with a funny twist : each of the two team mates hold only one of the poles and they have to set it up together.
Let's not forget that you can also play it on your own, trying to beat your own score !

Then, if you're down for some more challenge...
You can try to play with a maximum of two poles stacked, so you'll need to organize the ground pretty well...
Otherwise you can decide to play with a maximum of two poles touching the ground in each disctrict. Stack them wisely 😉

Thanks a lot for reading till there ! I sincerly hope you enjoyed this article, and if you do, don't be afraid to drop a like, a comment or a follow 😄
Other way around, don't be shy to leave a comment if anything bothered you, if you got any idea for me to improve, or if you want me to dive into any game you're interested in 🙂

n3wbie