Highly Ratted?

Certain themes are ubiquitous in board gaming; you'll find empire building games, city planning games, and wilderness exploration games in seemingly endless numbers. So on the occasion that a game with a more unusual and unique theme appears, it can immediately stand out from the crowd.

In First Rat, designers Gabriele Ausiello and Virginio Gigli cast the characters at rats racing to build a rocket ship that will be the first to take them to the moon (which, of course, is made of cheese). You amass tin cans for the rocket body, calculators for your guidance systems, and baking soda and vinegar for your propellant -- all while advancing on a light bulb track of bright ideas to make building easier, and paying cheese to opponents to use the opportunities they're otherwise blocking from you.

You begin the game with two out of four rats of your color at the start of a long and winding track (with ways to add those remaining two rats to the start of the track during the game). Spaces on the track are each marked in one of five colors, each color generating particular kinds of resources for you when you land on them. On your turn, you must advance one or more of your rats to a new space on the track. To land on a space occupied by any other players, you must pay each of those players one cheese. If you move only one of your rats, it may move up to 5 spaces forward. But you many instead move any number of your rats each up to 3 spaces, so long as they all land on the same color.

There are other wrinkles in there to satisfy more experienced gamers. There's a "maze" where different rewards can be unlocked, depending on the path you take. There are special bonuses to be claimed on the main track if you land on the right spaces; you must decide whether to pay for them with an exorbitant amount of cheese, or by sending your rat all the way back to the start of the track. There are several different ways to score points, each of which diminishes in value as more players claim them. You must balance all these considerations as you navigate the central challenge: how do you get what you want, and when is it worth paying other opponents to do so?

Explaining all the little ins and outs of the game is a little tricky. Really grasping how to best use the "multiple rat move" potential of a turn doesn't necessarily come naturally to everyone early on the first play. But fundamentally, your decision tree on each turn strikes a good balance between offering options while not being hopelessly complex. The game takes up to six players, and actually seems better on the higher end of that number for offering more opponents to get in your way on that central movement track. And it still moves fairly quickly with more players, as a turn doesn't involve much: make a move, take stuff, spend it if you can.

I've only played First Rat a couple of times so far. I did much better on my second play than my first, giving me a sense that there is strategy here to master. I enjoyed the experience both times in any case. I'm not yet sure if the strategy goes deep enough for the game to have real staying power... but everyone I've played it with so far has really enjoyed it and talked about wanting to play again.

So for the moment, I'll give First Rat a B+. I could see that either rising or falling a little as I get to play it more. There's probably not enough meat on the bone here for gamers who really like things epic and sophisticated, but First Rat seems like a solid choice for a group that likes to play through three or four different titles in an evening.