Review of Rat Splatter

Rat Splatter is a speed-style card game for two to six players (seven, according to the web site). Everyone plays at once. The deck consists of 55 cards -- 40 rat cards and 15 anvil cards. Your goal is to breed as many rats as possible then drop an anvil on them before one of the other players does. If you have the most squished rats, you win.

To begin breeding rats, you play any one of the rat cards onto the table. This card will show the rat's gender and the rat's type (one of ten different rat types). Anyone may play a rat of the opposite gender but of the same type on the first card. They mate and produce one rat. Anyone may play another rat of any type or any gender onto the pile to represent this offspring. Keep mating and producing offspring to grow the rat pile until someone drops an anvil on 'em. Whomever played that anvil card places all the rat cards and the anvil card into their scoring pile.

There can't be more rat piles than players, but none of the rat piles belong to any player. Anyone may play on any pile at any time.

Scoring is simple. Every rat card you have in your scoring pile is one point. Every anvil card in your pile removes one point. Add, subtract, compare.

So what's good about it?

It's a very fast game. If a game started when you began reading this review, it's probably over by now. Rat Splatter is very simple to play -- match rat type, play opposite gender, squish. Slightly more complex than War, not as complex as games like Go Fish or Crazy Eights. A fun game for adults as well as children if you ignore the whole "breeding rats to crush them into paste" thing. Cute anthropomorphic rat-being artwork on the cards.

So what's not so good about it?

The card layout should have been rethought. You've got a thick blue outline for male rats and a thick pink outline for females, but the names for rat types should have been reversed. The cards have the rat type listed at the top and bottom of each card, but they are oriented so one reads them from the bottom of the card. When fanning out the seven cards in your hand, you're either looking at just an upside-down symbol in the upper-left hand corner and, if you can fan them out properly, upside-down names. The male and female gender symbols appear in the upper-left and lower-right corners of the card. I'd switch them to the other two corners and flip the names over.

When the rats are played on rat piles, one can check the name and the artwork to see what type of rat has been played. It would have speed up gameplay if rats of similar type were all wearing similarly colored clothing. The "Funky" and the "Smarty" rats seem to do this, but the color scheme on the "Edgey" and "Trippy" rats don't match. In fast paced games like Rat Splatter, it's easier to recognize shapes of color and matching those than matching text. But as we're talking about shaving maybe five seconds off a ninety-second game, this is only a "what I would have done differently" nitpick.

Although the layout issue is a bit troublesome, the simple rules and ease of play more than make up for it.