‘Whimsical’ is possibly the first word to come to mind when confronted with Tiny Toe Beans: Ultimate Mischief, well, maybe after ‘awww.’ Designed by Marco Zannini and published by Cozy Games Studio, it’s a ‘Chaotic, Cozy Strategy Game for 2–4 Players’ with an estimated playing time of 30–45 minutes, in which you play a cat determined to cause as much chaos as it can, while avoiding and pranking the human in the house.
The blurb for the game reads: ‘You are not just a cat. You are an Expert of Mischief. The mansion is your playground: kitchens to raid, couches to shred, plants to topple, and boxes to conquer. But every paw step spreads chaos, and when chaos builds up, the Human comes storming in. Can you outwit your rivals, dodge the Human, and cause the most glorious mayhem to claim the title of Mischief Master?’
How to Play
The playing surface is a randomly arranged connected grid of 12 room tiles (out of 16), so there’ll be plenty of variability in the ‘mansion’ between games. The room tiles are initially face down, and will be revealed as cats enter them.
At the start of the game, ‘mischief’ cards associated with the chosen rooms are shuffled together with ‘prank’ cards and three dealt to each player. Players place their meeples together in one room in a corner of the map (turning that room card face up), with the human token (a somewhat bizarre looking hand—I’m not sure if it’s intended to be a ‘stop’ gesture or a threat to smack the cat!) in the opposite corner. A player count dependent number of mischief tokens (scoring points) are placed near the mansion.
On each turn, you first roll a die for movement, but this is not your normal cube… Besides numbers 1, 2, and 3, indicating the number of spaces you can move during this turn, siren and cat graphics appear on other faces. Rolling a siren alerts the human (more on this later) and you reroll; rolling a cat gives you three spaces to move as well as alerting the human.
After this, you can intersperse playing up to two cards from your hand and moving into new rooms in any direction, turning over the tile if this is the first time it’s been visited. You can play a mischief card only if it matches the room you’re in, receiving the number of mischief tokens indicated on the card, as well as adding chaos tokens to the room. Prank cards will typically penalise other players, such as moving them closer to the human. Additionally, once per turn you can discard a card for an extra movement or to drop a chaos token. Next, draw a card into your hand (as an option, you can play with a draft pool rather than drawing from the deck); this is where room-specific rules may also trigger, letting you, e.g., draw more cards. If you hand contains more than five cards, discard down to five.
The final part of your turn is to move the human. To do this, determine which room has most chaos tokens (there are rules for breaking ties), and move the human that many spaces towards it. When the human stops, remove all chaos tokens in that room; if there’s also a cat in the room, that player loses two mischief tokens—these tokens are removed from the game, not returned to the pool.
Tiny Toe Beans ends when there are no more mischief tokens in the pool, and after one more human movement, the player with most is the winner.
Wrap Up
Tiny Toe Beans is an incredibly cute game, with delightful illustrations throughout. The standard game uses cardboard standees for player and human meeples and tokens, with prettier wooden ones available in the premium version, along with a mini-expansion featuring a few more cards. The deluxe version also includes a neoprene mat, which while useful, most certainly won’t fit in the compact game box—this is a pocket-sized game. (There are a few other Kickstarter rewards, but those are the most important ones—apart from paying an arm and a leg to get your own cat used in artwork in the game.)
If you want to find out more about the game, check out its Kickstarter page, where there are also links to the rule book and an online demo.
About the author
When not playing board games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
