If you want to create a game that's more approachable for those who aren't gamers, perhaps you should consider making a game about animals. Even if people don't have pets, they generally know what pets are like, which gives them a leg up on learning a new game...assuming you make those animals do pet-like things, mind you.
That's what Courtney Shernan did with her debut release: Treat, Please!, which publisher Solis Game Studio released on the market in February 2026. As Shernan details in a designer diary, she mocked up the idea in 2019, then worked on it heavily in 2020 before pitching it to Chris Solis, who oversaw development, art, and production, with a crowdfunding campaign running in late 2024.
The game lasts seven days, and on each day you play two behavior cards from your hand to gain attention, energy, bones, and indicated actions. Bones let you acquire new behavior cards, which go to your hand for future turns, while attention and energy let you complete objectives for affection, which is the game's scoring metric.
Games about cats seem far more plentiful than those about dogs, but I don't know whether that's an indication of the dog market being underserved, of cat lovers buying more games, or of something else entirely. Maybe cats are just better than dogs, ergo we have more cat games than dog games. Maybe dog owners are playing with their dogs in real life, whereas cat owners need playful substitutes since cats can't be bothered to associate with humans.
Jason Tam's self-published game Cat Spotting debuted in late 2025, and gameplay is as simple as you can get: Turn over a "Spot This Cat" card, then spot this cat. The game includes 120 cats to spot and four sets of crowd cards, with each crowd card featuring forty cats.
In fact, rules for multiple games are included with Cat Spotting, and a print-and-play version is available for those who don't want to wait for a game from Australia. (Tam also has Peep Spotting for those who'd prefer to peep people over cats.)
Hmm, Cat Spotting seems to be the only realistic cat game on the market: Look at cats sitting there doing nothing.
Every other cat-centric design places them in unrealistic settings and activities. For example, in Muffin's Kitchen, a D. Brad Talton Jr. design for 2-5 players that Level 99 Games will crowdfund in March 2026, cats assemble ingredients to fulfill recipes.
In each of six rounds, you can ditch up to three ingredient cards from your hand and draw replacement cards up to three times, then everyone in turn reveals the ingredients for one of five recipe cards, summing the value of all ingredients used and marking their score for that recipe. You can repeat a recipe in a future round, but only your most recent score stands. At game's end, players earn ribbons depending on where they placed (first to fourth) in each recipe, and whoever has the most ribbon points wins.
Jeff and Rylie Wallace's Kittens in Space, which Dead Alive Games crowdfunded in mid-2025, puts 1-6 players to work in the Lunar Kitten Adoption Center to find homes for gravity-challenged cats — although in gameplay terms that means you need to shed your hand of cards first.
Each player has a hand of cards, which are numbered 0-9, and four discard piles are available, with a "Save 'Em" card on one pile; arrows on this card show whether the piles to the left must have higher cards played on them and piles to the right lower cards or vice versa. Each turn, you either draw a card and pass, or play up to one card on each discard pile, with the difference between your card and the covered card being at most two. In the latter case, you then move the "Save 'Em" card to a pile where you played, flipping it if you played a cat bell card.
Gareth Edwards' Cat Earth, which is coming from Outset Media in Q1 2026, is somewhat realistic in that cats like to knock things onto the floor, and that's what you're doing in this game.
However, the cat doing the action is three times the size of a house, and it's knocking houses off the edge of a flat Earth. Okay. Players take turns using movement cards to direct the cat, trying to push opponents' houses into the abyss, and each time the deck runs out, a new cat is added to the board, allowing for more breakage. To win, be the last player with a house still standing.
Publisher RAYBOX Games released a few "serious" fantasy titles in the early 2020s — Escape from Stalingrad Z, Gates of Niflheim — but its newest releases have moved on from zombies and Vikings to cats and more cats, all of which are doing rather uncatlike things.
In late 2025, for example, it crowdfunded The Cats of Mont Saint-Michel, a 1-4 player design from Marco Pecota and Tom Frank that has started shipping to backers. This miniatures-based solitaire/co-operative game is set in Mont Saint Michel before the French revolution, with the cat players fighting cockroaches, rats, and other beings in order to cleanse the abbey. The game features a coil-bound scenario book, with the outcome of each scenario affecting what comes next.
The Gamefound campaign also featured a separate design by Pecota, with The Kittens of Mont Saint-Michel being a co-operative card game in which you "explore the town and castle while learning the virtues courage, patience, competence, selflessness, perseverance and integrity on the path to becoming a true warrior", with the game ending with a battle against a vermin army.
And with Cats in boxes on the way to backers, RAYBOX has revealed its next release: The Cats of New Orleans, with this also being a miniatures-based solitaire/co-operative game that features a coil-bound scenario book, with the outcome of each scenario affecting what comes next. Hmm, déjà vu! You're now fighting mosquitos and snakes, in addition to rats, so that's different.
