review: The Kitten Game
I did a ton of reading while on vacation last week and wrote up reviews for everything, but didn't get around to copying it over to this computer, so instead, I present to you The Kitten Game.
- I've played similar games before (paperclips, spaceplan, candybox), but this is the first one that's really huge. the two candybox games had a bit of space to them, various branching options that could be explored, but they still came to an eventual conclusion at some point. according to the wiki for the kitten game, that's not the case here. it's designed to be cyclical, with various things earned in previous iterations that transfer into subsequent iterations; some paths are mutually exclusive, so you have to restart the cycle multiple times in order to try out everything.
- It's a great patience game. Once you get enough catnip fields up and running, there's no real danger of something going wrong, so you can set things running, go away and doing something else for a bit, and then come back and build/buy things with what's accumulated. Really, once you get a couple days into to the game, that's the only way to play it without going nuts in the process.
- Strategic planning is the name of the game--you have stats for everything, so it's just a matter of figuring out what your goals are and then what order of purchases will get you there in the least amount of time (and then not making impulse buys that kick you back to zero).
- There are unicorns. They're important. Also, ziggurats. Also important.
