RACE TO THE RAFT
Avoid the steady build-up of flaming tiles in this puzzle based follow up to Isle of Cats
Designer: Frank West | Publisher: The City of Games
If you play Race to the Raft a couple of times, you’ll see the DNA inherited from previous designs from The City of Games catalogue.
Whether it’s the use of bags for randomness akin to City of Kings, the puzzle elements and tile overlap from Vadoran Gardens, or the obvious theming connection with The Isle of Cats, Race to the Raft seems to be the culmination of several elements that have worked for Frank West over his many years of board game design.
In Race to the Raft, you are quite literally herding cats from one side of a beautifully illustrated island to the other, as it’s slowly engulfed in flames, hoping to reach the potential safety of a waiting raft with your feline friends. You’ll do this by creating paths for each of the cats, who will only travel across their favourite terrain, all the while trying to prevent them from being cut off from the rescue raft. Race to the Raft is a co-operative game, as you work to either win together or not. Each round, players will draw three cards from a choice of four decks, each deck offering a varying probability of drawing a certain type of terrain. Once everyone has drawn, you’ll then freely take turns to play cards that create pathways, or discard cards in order to move a cat closer to safety. Whenever a card is played or for every fourth card discarded in a round, a fire tile is drawn randomly from the bag and added the island, spreading danger rapidly.
This would all be simple and straight-forward if the team was allowed to talk during the game. However, talking is only allowed at certain points, with what you can say being highly restricted as well. This is going to drive some players deliciously up the wall, as you aren’t allowed to tell other players where to play cards or lay fire tiles once any card has been drawn. It effectively dampens those quarterbacking flames which a lot of other cooperative games can suffer from. For those who can’t resist communication, there are tokens that allow you to talk or meow, if you really must.
What works for me most is the scalability of it in terms of difficulty. Race to the Raft commences with gentle introduction through its campaign mode, which offers a simple enough experience that you could quite happily play with the youngest players in the house. You can continue to play it like that if you want, slowly introducing new concepts and rules to be followed as everyone gets more comfortable with the game. You can also play it with the claws fully out, using the disaster deck for added peril and requirements on how the cats should arrive on the raft, or even download some additional secret objectives to make things even trickier.
Sit down with some of the harder scenarios and you’ll find yourself being severely tested on your planning skills. Race to the Raft gives the impression of being something gentle that looks great and purrs at the slightest touch, but when you delve a bit deeper, there is definitely something that will hiss and spit at your meagre attempts to navigate its various challenges.
To me, it is the slightly older and confident sibling of The Isle of Cats. It sits proudly on the table with a rainbow assortment of colours (with colour blind friendly terrain features) but isn’t afraid to punish you for your mistakes if you don’t plan ahead effectively. It’s the cat that got the cream.
RICHARD SIMPSON
WE SAY
A bright and colourful game with hidden difficulties and depths. Ideal for both younger and experienced players alike.
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ Campaign book
◗ Fire bag
◗12 Location cards
◗4 Raft cards
◗4 Large island boards
◗4 Small island boards
◗2 Meow tokens
◗2 Talk tokens
◗31 Fire tiles
◗22 Fire cards
◗12 Cat figures
◗100 Pathway cards
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED THE ISLE OF CATS...
The puzzle element is ramped up, but still keeps within the established theme of feline rescue