Cat Lady -- The Card Game is a nearly purr-fectly reproduction of the physical card game created by Josh Wood.

Two to four can play, human or AI, in Classic or Challenge mode.

In Classic mode, AI comes in Easy, Medium, and Hard flavors. In a nice nod to creator Josh Wood's dedicating the game to his childhood feline friends and that males can be crazy cat ladies, too, the Easy AIs are all characterized as little boys. Multiplayer is hot-seat style, and the game seems enabled for the new Steam Remote Play.

Challenge mode puts you one-on-one against an AI named (naturally) A Cat Lady. She is even harder than the Hard AIs of the Classic game.

Gameplay is quick yet complicated. Fortunately, an excellent three-part tutorial walks you through the concepts.

The goal of the game is to score more points than your fellow feline enthusiasts. Mostly, this is in collecting kitties and treating them to yummy food. Collecting other items helps to add to your score.

The main deck is just over 100 cards consisting mostly of Cats to adopt, Food to feed your kitties, Toys to entertain them, and Costumes to entertain ... more you than the cat. (The poor cat modeling the costumes on the cards wears a suitably annoyed expression.) There are also a few special cards in this main deck whose purpose will be revealed later.

A small side deck is filled with Stray Cats to also adopt. The game doesn't make this clear, but a look at the physical game's documentation online shows that this deck has 13 strays. These cats have special abilities that unlock once you feed them.


Gameplay

The main deck is used in full only if four are playing. Certain cats are among those cards pulled if only two or three are playing. This ensures a relatively consistent gameplay for a given player regardless of the number of players with her.

Regardless of deck size, it is shuffled and the top cards are laid out Tarot style in a 3x3 grid. The Stray Cat deck is shuffled and three cards are drawn and set up alongside the grid.

On her turn, each player will take all three cards in a horizontal row or vertical column and then new cards are put in their place in the grid.

A cat token is placed at the head of the row or column that was just taken and replaced. In the physical game, it is a black cat in profile. Here, it is a lock with a cat's face, making its purpose more intuitive. This blocks the next player from taking the same group that was just removed, and ensures that no row or column lays stagnant and untouched for long. Note that it does NOT block you from taking any card in that blocked row that crosses with a free column you wish to take.

One of the special cards is of a spray bottle filled with water. Play that card on your turn, and you can spritz water on that pesky cat token to shoo it to another spot, and therefore be free to take that row it blocked and/or block the next player from pouncing on a juicy row.

Another card is the Lost Cat poster. If you collect two such cards, you win the right to select one of the Stray Cats, and can do so at any remaining turn. These cards are not replaced; only the three drawn at the beginning can be adopted in that game.

Players keep taking turns taking rows and columns until you run out of cards to replenish the grid with. Then it is time to feed your cute kitties.

There are three food types: Chicken, Tuna, and Milk. A handful of food cards are Wild, not in the food sense, but in the traditional card game sense, as this card can stand for any of the three. Each cat desires a different meal to be satisfied. Some only want one serving of a treat, others wish for two of one and one of another, or two servings of a favorite food.

Once you're satisfied with how you've allocated your food, you hit a button to commit to it and see how your score fared against the other players.


Scoring

The game keeps a running score as you play and as you allocate food in the final phase. It also does this for the other players, and allows you to peek at their card haul until all players need to finish feeding their kitties.

Each cat has a number or asterisk to the side. This is the number they add to your score once they are fully fed. While in real life, the instinct to give everyone just a little of bit of their faves would serve you well, in this game, only a fully-fed or treated cat counts. You are penalized for every cat not fully fed.

The ones with asterisks will count differently depending on certain conditions. A few of the Stray Cats, for instance, will count for however many kitties of a certain color you have and fully feed.

The colors are just three: Black, White, and Orange. Two-color cats are added if there are three players. If four play, Multicolored cats with all three colors (think Calico or Tortiseshell) are also added, and count for all three colors. A letter notation in the upper left corner clarifies what colors the cat counts toward. Both the two-color and three-color regular cats also count more if your kitty collection contain cats with a chosen color.

Almost all of the Stray Cats are worth more if they are fed and some other condition is true.

There is a small penalty for wasting food, if you're the one with the most food left over. One of the Stray Cats (with the unfortunate name of Cow) is a starving stray who will happily vacuum up all your leftover food and save you from that penalty.

The Toys you collect score more points for the more different toy types you have. A toy mouse, a scratching post, and a ball of yarn is better than three toy mice. Variety is the spice of life for kitties as well as humans!

The player with the most Costumes scores a nice point bonus. But if you have no costumes at the end of the game, you lose points.

The final point category is for Catnip. The more Catnip, the better! Possess no Catnip, and you have neither penalty nor bonus. Possess just one, and you are penalized because your kitties are fighting over it. Two or three, and you score a point for each fed kitty. Four, and you get two points per cat!

The final tally helpfully lays out a breakdown of how you scored, including both the number of cards and the net score in these categories.


Other notes

You can breeze through an individual game in under five minutes when playing against AIs.

The artwork on these cards are a very faithful (maybe too faithful) reproduction of the original hand-drawn art. There's no purr-sonality distinguishing the cats beyond name, food needs, and abilities. All the cats are clearly the same sketch, if with different colors. But this is a flaw inherent in the original physical game.

Music is a lovely light jazz number. The cats respond charmingly with meows and purrs.

Achievements are marked in the game in a beautiful, if cluttered, living room scene, and include the minor reward of seeing progress percentages calculated at the end of the game.

I am reviewing this game as it comes to its launch date in December 2019, and it already has seasonal content. Christmassy toys like jingle bells and a present box and costumes such as Santa, elf, and reindeer have been swapped in, as well as some Hanukkah nods. The achievement screen also reflects this with a Christmas tree and other decorations, snow outside, and some added achievements for collecting some of the seasonal content cards in games. Presumably the devs will have other events through the years they sustain this adorable game.


This game was received for free through Curator Connect. Honestly, it's not the type of game I normally play on Steam. But it was too cute to pass up!

Cat lady is a simple and addictive little card game.

UI might take you a moment to understand but the rules are simple and easy to get into, matches are fast and the artwork is cute!
While it lacks multiplayer, with hot seat and Steam's new remote play together you can emulate that and play with up to 4 people.

Good addition to your library if you either love card games... or cats and who doesn't love either? :D

At the start it looks really dumb, but it ends up being one of those "just one more try, it doesn't take long (about 5 - 10 minutes). And suddenly, its much later than you were planning.

Quick, cute, fun game with good graphics and effects. And a lot harder than it looks.

Cat Lady is a very good card game with lots of cats. The rules are kind simple but it's very fun!!! The graphics are unique and cool and the soundtrack is really great. I highly recommend it!!! 💗🐈💗

I own the physical version of this game and have played it with my wife a few times.

This is a great video game adaptation of the physical card game. The art and sound effects are cute and thematically appropriate. It's quick to learn, quick to play, and the in-game tutorial is really well done.

There is only one thing that stops me from recommending this. At any time during the game, you can click another player's name to see what cards they have, but once the game is scored you no longer have the ability to check their cards. This makes no sense and prevents you from checking the end of game cards of your opponent to know how you won or lost.

In my last game, I was 20 points ahead of the AI player in the last turn, then suddenly they jumped ahead and won by 5 points. I can see they gained points from feeding cats in the scoring phase, but I can't check to see what cats they fed, which is stupid. This seems like a really silly oversight for such a well done adaptation and prevents me from enjoying the game because 50% of the games I lose, I have no idea how I lost. This is not a problem in the physical game, as you can see your own and your opponent's cattery at all times.

The other (minor) annoyance I have is that after every match you play, the game goes to an achievement room and updates the % completion for each achievement. It does this one by one and there appears to be no way to skip this, so you have to sit and watch the game add 1-2% to 40 different achievements each time.

That being said, given the low price tag and frequent 50% off sales on this game, I really can't not recommend it, even with the major flaw above.

An addictive card game with cats. You come across the Cad Lady club and you want to be part of it. To prove your worth, you have to play a game of cards with the ladies there. (Psst! These ladies are tough! I could only beat the boys in the club!)

PROS:
- Cute scenes and cards;
- Casual relaxing music;
- Feed and adopt cats;
- Collect toys and costumes;
- Trophy room;
- Choose the versus one player or versus all players mode;
- You can invite a friend to play together;
- Obtainable achievements;
- Choose between a simple (classic) mode and the expert (Cat Lady) mode;

CONS:
- I advice the developers to make the game ask the player for a tutorial at the very beginning. Otherwise, it would make the players ask around "What am I supposed to do here?" That's what happened to me.
- When I want to scroll down in order to feed the cats, the big pink phone doesn't scroll smoothly. Instead it stops and it's kind of frustrating not to be able to feed your cats.

You have to be careful to feed the cats, adopt the strays and collect the toys, costumes and catnip. Let's see if you can beat the Cat Ladies!

Desperately needs a story mode.

As is it's basically solitaire, unless you have friends who play, but it's about as much fun as old school card games, so getting friends to play often isn't really a thing. So in the end it's just endless solitaire where nearly all the achievements are based purely on the fact you kept playing not that you actually did anything particularly impressive.

For this type of game it's also very disappointing there are no steam trading cards.

A cat game is always the best game :3

Achievement Difficulty: 4/10
NOTICE: There is only one difficult achievement where you have to win 100 Times against 1 strong NPC it is just RNG and it takes some time
Bugs: there were not achievement based bugs for me
Time till 100%: ~14h
Other: You can 100% the Game alone

Game is great and fun. But the UI is very buggy. Sometimes when you want to feed the cat, it is unresponsive - you have to close the cat card, click it again, then try to feed. But the biggest problem is that, the right panel often fails to scroll. You can't scroll to top or bottom, and are locked in the middle. This means, sometimes you can't view the top row of your cats. These UI bugs are ruining this game which could have been perfect.