Nine Lives

Nine Lives is a fast (party) card game about being a cat trying to NOT lose your lives.

Each round, you take turns playing a single card, building a collection of cats on the table. If you can’t play a card anymore, you lose a life.

But that’s not the end. You may wager lives to gain a temporary ability to survive this round. If you still lose, however, you lose all the lives you wagered as well!

What’s special?

The core idea of this game is extremely simple and effective:

• Don’t be the first to lose all your lives.
• Losing a round makes you lose a life. (You can’t play a card if that specific cat already appears 9 times.)
• But you can wager lives (a risk-reward thing) to try and stay alive a little longer. (And hope somebody else loses before your next turn.)

The game is explained in a minute, but gives real strategy and tension for half an hour.

That’s why this idea eventually turned into three versions, adding Nine Lives: Math Meows and Nine Lives: Tricksy Kittens. I call the other two versions spin-offs, because they’re not sequels or expansions, but rather a standalone game with the same theme and core mechanic.

The game is also textless. Powers and cats are simple icons. This simplicity and friendliness to kids is why I deemed this version the base game. (The other versions, for example, have numbers on the cards and textual powers.)

Going forward, I try to achieve this more and more. I guess my younger self just didn’t realize the average age at which kids learn to read. Many of my older games are very kid-friendly … if it weren’t for the text or (difficult) numbers.

Finally, these games are part of an ongoing series: simple fast card games in which one specific number is important for everything. After Sixpack, we now have Nine Lives. I like such elegant and minimal games that share a common theme—perhaps I’m a mathematician after all. (Though this series has no concrete name or endgoal yet.)