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SituationalBOOoop. Review
6.5/ 10- Played 1 time on this shelf
- 2 players · best at 2
- 25–35 min
- Light
BOOoop, and the Original I Never Owned
I'll say the plain part first, since it saves everybody some time. I don't know that Booooop! does anything better than the original boop. I picked it up because it was around Halloween a few years ago and I didn't own the original. That's the whole origin story.
I still don't own the original, but I had played it a number of times before BOOoop! ever came into the house, so I know what the ghosts are being added to. That lets me tell you what's different on paper and what the game feels like to play against what I remember of the first one. It doesn't let me tell you which of the two I'd reach for if both were sitting on my table.
Both games are the same small idea. Two players, a quilted bed for a board, and a pile of kittens and cats. When you place a piece, every piece sitting next to it gets booped one space directly away, and anything that gets pushed off the edge goes back to its owner's hand. Kittens can't boop cats, which matters more than it sounds. Line up three kittens and they grow up into cats, and cats are the pieces that win you the game, so a lot of the thinking is about getting your kittens to grow up in a spot where your opponent can't undo it. It plays quickly and feels close to chess in how every move reshapes the whole position, except that the pieces are round and cute and the pushing is the whole point.
The Halloween version keeps all of that and adds a ghost cat for each player. At the end of your turn you can place your ghost, and from then on it drifts along a row or column on its own, one step each turn, until it floats off the board. The ghost doesn't sit on a space the way your other pieces do. It lives on the line between two spaces, so it only spooks the two pieces it passes between, and when it does, those pieces jump clear over their neighbors to get away from it. A ghost can't break up a line of cats, which is a mercy. It can pull a kitten out of position, though, and it will pull one of your own pieces out of position just as easily as one of your opponent's.
The wrinkle that stuck with me is the timing. You can't graduate your kittens or win until after your ghost has moved. So a plan that looked finished before you placed the ghost may not be finished once the ghost has gone by. The ghost is a small piece of the future, and unlike everything else on the board, it moves whether you want it to or not.
There are also new hats on the cats and pumpkins on the kittens, and they look good. The ghosts are a bit wide for the space they're meant to occupy, so now and then two of them crowd each other and a kitten has to squeeze in between. You can also leave the ghosts in the box and play the original game with the new tokens, so Booooop! contains boop inside it. For someone like me who doesn't own the first one, that matters. In a sense I own both now, and I got there without ever buying the original.
What I like is that the ghost adds a little uncertainty without adding much to learn. You can see where it's headed, so you can plan around it, and a clever player can set a trap that the ghost springs for them a turn or two later. What I can't say is whether that makes the game deeper or only different. I played the original enough to feel the ghosts change its rhythm, and I still can't tell you whether that change is an improvement or just a new flavor. Someone who has played the original two hundred times might find the ghosts a welcome change or an interruption, and I'm not sure which camp I'm in.
Still, I think there's something to be said for owning the version you happened to find. We tend to talk about games as if the first edition is the real one and everything after is commentary. I learned this game one way and the copy that ended up on my shelf is a different one, and the idea of booping holds up fine in either.
What stays with me is the ghost itself, sliding along the seam between two spaces with its tiny hat, scaring two pieces off in different directions and then wandering off the edge of the bed as if nothing had happened.
