Curious by nature – and often to a fault – kittens often get themselves into trouble but add a dash of magic to the mix and these magical kittens take it to a whole different level! With magical kittens and a magical library full of magical books what could go wrong, right? An absolute cat-astrophe, that’s what! While in the library, Muffin and her friends manage to let their curiosity get the best of them and ended up releasing an entire book’s worth of curses! In the game of Wizard Kittens from Magpie Games, up to four players will take on the roles of these charming cats. Can they team up and use their magic to not only collect the curses but also put them back before the librarian, Professor Whispurr, discovers what they’ve done?

Magpie Games was founded in 2011 and is known mostly for its library of roleplaying games including Chaos Worlds, Masks, Bluebeard’s Bride, and their forthcoming game: Root: The RPG. Wizard Kittens, designed by the team of Marissa Kelly, Brendon Conway, and Mark Diaz Truman is their first non-roleplaying game. Wizard Kittens was crowdfunded alongside its expansion, Magical Monsters, via a Kickstarter campaign in March of 2019 and features artwork from Mirco Paganessi, Meagan Trott, Miguel Angel Espinoza, and Dawn “Pennydoth” Lawson. Along with the four standard kittens (BaeBae, Easa, Muffin, and Grumpkin), Kickstarter backers received Cinder, Ser Isaac McFluffykins, Daisy, Marquise de Cat, Whiskitos, Bandit, and Orion as playable kittens. Players may recognize Marquise de Cat from Leder Games’ Root and Orion from Renegade Game Studios’ Bargain Quest!

There are three different modes of play for Wizard Kittens: basic, advanced, and chaos mode. In the basic game each cat has the same four abilities: Summon, Sling, Swat, and Switch. The advanced game, however, swaps out one of each kitten’s basic spells and replaces it with their own unique spell as well as introduces New Rule cards. If you guessed that chaos mode uses more of the Chaos Cats, you are correct! How many extra Chaos Cats are added is up to the players and each addition adds more randomization to the game. Chaos mode also uses its own set of Chaos Mode Cards in the place of the New Rules cards. Each of these modes does have a slight variation in setup. Also, chaos mode, unfortunately, isn’t playable with 2-players. I feel it is also important to point out that, though the box says Wizard Kittens is playable for 2-4 players, the game is really meant for 3-4 players and includes a 2-player variant. While this may be a deterrent for some, my partner and I quite enjoyed it and found ourselves feeling a bit more challenged than we were with the base game at 3 or 4 players.

As previously stated, setting up a game of Wizard Kittens depends heavily on which mode of play you are using. For the purposes of this review, we are going to focus on the basic game. Firstly, each player needs to set up their respective “Ritual Circle” or play area, which consists of a character card and matching token, a set of Chapter cards, an Extra Credit card, and two Ritual Component cards. The specific layout of the Ritual Circle can be found in the rulebook. Then the Component and Curse decks need to be constructed. After handing out the Ritual Component cards to the players, the remaining cards are used to construct a common deck with additional cards having been added that will come into play later. The Curse deck is made up of two Easy Curse cards, two Medium Curse cards, and two Hard Curse cards. The remaining Curse cards are removed from play altogether. All additional set up instructions for other modes of play can also be found in the rulebook.

Wizard Kittens plays very quickly and offers players a myriad of choices during a player’s turn; some of which will be very strategic for curse catching while others will be geared towards collecting more components for future turns. Each cat has access to four different spells regardless of the mode of play. The basic spells grant the ability to discard cards, draw extra cards, swap cards around that are already in play, or even to gift a card to another player’s Ritual Circle. When playing in advanced mode, each cat will have swapped out one of their basic spells for a more personalized, unique one. One of my favorite advanced spells is Bandit’s spell “Forage”, which allows the player to draw the top two cards from the discard pile and place them in the same chapter of their Ritual Circle! Bandit no longer has the Summon spell as part of their repertoire. Once a spell is chosen for a round, the player will mark it with their player token. As spells can not be used two turns in a row, it is sometimes wiser to wait to cast them in favor of other, lesser spells so one can make a bigger move later. Before ending their turn, the active player will collect any of the curses they defeated. While they will score points for defeating the curse, they will also lose points for any extra, unused Ritual Components they had in play for that particular Chapter when the curse was captured. At the end of the turn, players will fill the empty Chapters with a new Curse Card unless there are no more to be drawn. Play starts with the player who has last fed, pet, or seen a cat and then moves to the left. It continues in this way until either all six Curses are contained once again within their tome or someone draws the Professor Whispurr card from the Components deck. Should all curses be defeated, the kitten with the most points at the end of the game wins. If the kittens were caught, all kittens with ten or more points lose, and the kitten with the least amount of Ritual Components in their Ritual Circle out of the remaining kittens is declared the winner.

The Wizard Kittens: Magical Monsters expansion is basically like having three mini-expansions – or, in this case, “modules” – rolled into one. The first one adds more core cards to the game as well as a whole new playable kitten: Van Meowsing! As with the other kittens, Van Meowsing also has his own unique spell for advanced mode and it is a doozy! The next module adds the ability and components to expand the player count to include a fifth player. Other than a few changes to the Components and Curse decks, the game smoothly transitions to this new player count. The third and final module brings in monsters as a new element to the game. There are six monsters including a dragon, which is, of course, Morgan’s favorite! Each game, two monsters will be chosen and will replace two randomly removed cards in the Curse deck.

I’m not going to lie, Wizard Kittens originally won me over with just the adorable art and bright colors and I just knew it was something I had to try! Now that I have played it several times with several different modes, I am very happy that I was a Kickstarter backer. Wizard Kittens combines a lot of the things I like in games and rolls it all into one. I feel that set collection is a great mechanic for both beginner and advanced gamers alike and the semi-cooperative nature of the game makes for a lot of quirky and amusing player interactions that I don’t often get from the typical set collection game. I also enjoyed that the game transitions flawlessly from one mode to another as players add more and more components and rules. I can’t count the number of times I’ve gotten ready to play a game that I like and had an expansion not quite fit or a promo card completely break the theme and this absolutely does not happen here! Though I feel the rulebook over explains a few things and makes the game seem uncharacteristically daunting looking when just reading through it, Wizard Kittens is actually a breeze to set up and to play with gamers young and old. The extra kitten characters add quite a bit of variety to the game and I’m hoping that with time there will be more expansions available (or perhaps a few clever homebrewers out there who want to share their amazing creations – I know Morgan would love to be in the game!).

All photos of Magpie Games products included in this review were taken and edited by Krista.