Is an armadillo cuter than an aardvark? Raccoons have sweet and fuzzy little faces, but so do red pandas! Who takes the cake between the two? Can any one animal be truly crowned critter supreme in a battle of the cutest?
Feelin’ Cute, a card game for 2-8 players, asks players to rank the cuteness of creatures all across the animal kingdom. Whether it’s a snow leopard or an arctic fox, it’s a showdown to decide which cute critter can take the crown.
Gameplay Overview:
Each player chooses one of the adorable animal paw tokens. The Cute board goes in the center of the table, and the three blob fish tokens are placed blob face down. The cards are shuffled into a central deck, and one is drawn and placed face up on the top of the cute line to be the starting place.
On their turn, a player takes a card off the deck and places it face up on the bottom of the cute track. They decide secretly if they think this animal is cuter or less cute than the existing animals on the cute track. Once they’ve decided, they tell the group that they are ‘Feelin’ Cute!’ The others put their paw tokens on the cute track where they think the player will place the animal card. The active player reveals their choice and places the card on the cute line.
Any player who guessed correctly gets a point. If no players guess correctly, a blob fish is flipped over. When all three blob fish are revealed, the game ends. The player with the most points wins. The deck also contains power cards that let you shift cards on the cute line or get an extra cute guess.
Game Experience:
There are a few things right off the bat that I didn’t love about this. The first is that the game doesn’t provide a way for you to track your points. There aren’t any tokens or score tracks, a missed educational opportunity for kids to practice counting, numeral identification, or number lines while they play. While I’m totally supportive of kids’ games where earning points isn’t the priority, if the rules say that the winner is the one with the most at the end of the game, there should be some way to keep track of that beyond tallying them on your own piece of scrap paper.
There is a co-op version, but the rule change is just to work together to build the biggest line. This quickly devolves into just laying out the cards and talking about the animals. While the deck is generously sized with lots of animal variety, this can only entertain a toddler for so long.
The second issue is much larger. The cute leader doesn’t lock in their choice in any way other than to think about it and declare that they’ve decided. This means that there’s nothing to prevent them from being a little mischievous and changing their mind after everyone has laid down their paws. With games targeted at older players, it is reasonable to talk about this and use the honor system. With such a young target audience, though, pushing boundaries is their job.
Sorting their world into fair or not fair, true or a lie, is developmentally appropriate. No one wants to have game night deteriorate into a meltdown about how big sister isn’t playing right, and the game isn’t fair because no one is giving them points. Also, it’s not really a game if the players can control who gets points when or how soon it ends by just saying no one guessed correctly and flipping over a blob fish.
In practice, the kids at the target age that I played this with mostly just wanted to look at all of the animal cards and lay them out, and the older kids were disinterested in a game with no depth or strategy. Kids’ games can engage imagination and skill building in thousands of interesting and captivating ways, but this game just shows them a picture and asks them a yes or no question about it. While it may be an entertaining activity for a few minutes, no one is really challenging themselves.
Final Thoughts:
Family games work best when everyone is engaging together in play. Feelin’ Cute at best involves only the youngest kids playing and everyone else at the table is facilitating their entertainment. While there’s nothing wrong with this, there are better and more creative games out there for families that want to join together in the experience.
