So in an effort not to be a terrible father we had a family game night last night and I played the card game I got off Kickstarter called Cattube Famous. The goal of the game is to become famous on Youtube by posting cat videos. The game boils down to a form of poker. You have video cards in your hand and get one extra per round. Those are basically your chips. 4 trend cards are dealt each round, 3 face up, 1 face down. Each cat video card you have had a set of characteristics that let you gain subscribers by matching them with the trend cards. So say the trends of the round are Fat, Cool and Lazy, you'll want to match video cards that give you bonus subscribers from those trends but avoid using cards that give you minus subscribers.



Each player bets a number of video cards face down and everyone can either raise or pass. Once everyone has passed, you flip over the 4th trend card then add up your subscriber gain based on the video cards you played. Whoever gets the most in the round wins all the trend cards, which are worth either 1 or 2 victory points each depending on their type. If it's a tie in subscribers, a 5th trend card gets dealt and you recalculate. Game ends when all trend cards are dealt and you tally up victory points. As I mentioned, it's basically a variant of poker with a cute theme. Your cards are your chips, they are a limited resource. You start with 5 and you only get 1 extra per round, so you have to bet carefully and choose when to fold. This also allows you to bluff, since each player takes their turn individually. If I put down 3 cards on a round face down, everyone else might decide to just fold rather than try and beat me, because only the guy with the highest subscribers wins the victory points.



Alternatively, I could be just putting down complete junk and they wouldn't necessarily know. There are 15 trends in total, each of which has 2 copies in the deck, so you can count cards (which would probably make the game extremely easy for experienced gamblers) and there's a cool element of risk in not knowing what the 4th card is going to be until after you have bet. The theme is very cute, each video is different and well illustrated and the subscriber bonuses on each card have Youtube comments underneath them (which are all equally terrible, as per the theme). Takes about 10-15 mins to play a game. Not a deep game, certainly, but it has a bit more nuance than you might think and we had fun playing it.



The one downside, depending on your group, is that you have to do basic multiplication and addition to tally up your subscribers each round so lets be honest, if you suck at counting in your head, you're going to slow the game down.