Nine lives tricksy kittens header

Nine Lives: Tricksy Kittens

Official page: https://pandaqi.com/the-outnumbered-series/count-to/nine-lives-tricksy-kittens
Official page for this project
(Developer) Diary: https://pandaqi.com/blog/boardgames/the-outnumbered-series/nine-lives-tricksy-kittens
A diary about the process of creating this project

Nine Lives: Tricksy Kittens is a fast card game about being the first cat to gain all your 9 lives.

It’s a trick-taking game, but with the familiar Nine Lives twist at its core. Before playing a round, you must bid how many tricks you expect to win. Only if you achieve it exactly, your bid card is scored as extra lives.

And as usual, you can wager lives to get special powers that shake up how each trick plays out!

What’s special?

As expected, this is a spin-off for the original Nine Lives.

What’s different? Well, it’s a trick-taking game! When I went to university, I played a lot of Spades. You can clearly see its influence in the design of this game.

If you read the developer diary, you’ll see that this game went through loads of different versions. I kept trying to make a trick-taking game, while changing almost everything about trick-taking. Only once I forbade myself to change anything about how most trick-taking games work, and apply the Nine Lives sauce around it, did the game start to come together.

It will come as no surprise that this spin-off was the very last one to be made and completed. Being a lover of trick-taking myself, however, it’s probably my favorite.

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