Welcome back to Cooperative Surprise Month! After being surprised (in a good way) by Sammu-Ramat a few weeks ago (see our review here), and finding an old review of Chainsomnia (see our review last week), we take a look at a quirky cooperative game with a surprisingly unique theme! Let’s take a look at Hissy Fit!

Really, the theme of this game, Hissy Fit!, is taking cats to the veterinarian. I am not making this up!

Hissy Fit! is a cooperative card game for 1-4 players that plays in about 20 minutes. Hissy Fit! was on Kickstarter back in January 2023; it promised delivery in November 2023, but it didn’t deliver to me until late February 2024. So it was about 3-4 months late; that’s not a big deal in Kickstarter land.

I picked Hissy Fit! up because it looked cute, and it was cheap: it was only $20 on Kickstarter (plus shipping).  Did I get my money’s worth?

Unboxing

Hissy Fit! is a small cooperative card game in smallish box: see the Coke Can for  perspective above.

There are 58 cards in this game (see many above) and some supporting tokens and sheets (see below).

If you are a cat fan (which is probably why you are here), you have a myriad of choices for “what cat sticker” goes on the cat meeple: see above.

This game is cute, everything is very readable, and it’s very cute (I know, I said that already).  If you like cats, you will probably like this game.  If you don’t like cats … you may still like this game: keep reading!

Rulebook … I mean … Pamphlet.

The rulebook is a pamphlet. Sigh.

It folds out, and it’s quite readable, despite it’s largish footprint.

It even gets a decent grade on the Chair Test (maybe a B): it basically fits and has a good size font with a lot of good pictures and examples.

The set-up is good: it has a picture (with annotations! see above) and is very well done.

This rulebook is better than I expected.  It teaches the rules pretty well and it’s pretty easy to read.  Its major sin is  that “it’s just a pamphlet”, but it surprisingly good.  (There’s no index or chapters, but it doesn’t need one: this is a relatively simple game).

Gameplay

The humans need to get the cat to the vet, but of course, the cat uses all its wiles to not go! The Cat Tracker card (see above) show how much you need to do to get the cat to the vet! Basically, this is a race! You are trying to move the cat meeple from the start to the cat carrier (see above)! If players can cooperatively move the cat meeple to the end, they win! Huzzah!

There are 4 difficulties to the game, depending on how hard you want the game! There’s  Kitten mode, Cat mode, Fierce Mode, and Feral mode! See two Cat Tracker cards above for Cat mode and Feral Mode!!

Feral mode (above right) is the hardest mode, as you have fewer scratches you can can endure and further to go!

Players win if they get the cat meeple to the end, but if the players ever get too many scratches (the red cube at the maximum number of scratches), they lose!

Players also lose if the cat has three hissy fits! 

Every hissy fit icon on the cards will advance the hissy fit card … if you ever get three tokens on the card, the hissy fit happens!

The game has a fairly typical cooperative game arc: “bad news” cards start the round, and players play “good news” cards to help. The “bad news” cards are the Cat Cards (see above). As these cards come out, they cause continual bad stuff to happen! For example: In the white panel above is a backward paw: it causes the cat meeple to go backwards unless you get rid of that Zoomies card!

The players play Human Cards to help deal withe Cat Cards.  When you play a Human Card, you choose one of the good effects (in the white strip) on the card.  The rightmost effect (see above) would move the cat meeple forward three spaces!  The leftmost effect would give two resources of each type of Cat Attitudes: you place cubes on the Cat Cards appropriately.

If you get enough Cat Attitude resources, you can get rid of the Cat Card!  For example, when we play the Tuna Can card to stop the Zoomies (see above), we only have 2 Angry Cat resources (brown), so we can only partly stop the Zoomies: we need to play another human card with the Angry cat (brown) symbol: we use the clear cubes to note what we have already played.  Unfortunately, the Zoomies stays out another turn.

Turns are pretty quick and easy: the current player draws a Cat Card and suffers its bad effects, then that current player gets to do 2 things: play a Human Card or draw a Human card!  You can choose any Human Card in the display, or you can blindly draw the top.   Once you are done, move left to the next player! Play continues until the cats win or the humans win!

One of the most important rules in the game is playing combos: when any player plays a card, another player can follow and play a card with the same symbol!  See the example above (from the rules) with the yarn ball symbol allowing the players to play three cards!  

This combo rule is critical to winning the game: it allows you to play many cards in one shot if you really need to!

Solo Game

The solo game is well-specified and very simple (thank you for following Saunders’ Law): there is only one player, but he starts the game with 5 Human Cards.  The solo player simply keeps taking his turn over and over, basically rotating back to himself.  Cat Card, Two Actions, Cat Card, Two Actions, repeat!

The victory and loss conditions are exactly the same: the only thing that really changes depending on the number of players is how many cards the player(s) starts with! 

I was able to learn, then play the game twice in the same night as my friends came over!   I lost my first solo game and won my second (on Kitten Mode).  I started groking it pretty quickly.

I lost my first game because I didn’t take the rulebook/pamphlet seriously!  The game is all about playing combos to win!  See above as I play three Human Cards that all have the mouse icon! Yep, you gotta play combos to win!

This is a light solo game that plays in 20 minutes.  It’s pretty fun. If I am waiting for someone and just want to kill 20 minutes, this would be a fun and easy game to play: it’s not too thinky, but it’s still very engaging.

Cooperative Game

The cooperative game flowed well.  After I learned the game, I was able to teach everyone the game fairly quickly: part of that is because the solo game is still the main game!  It’s really easy to get into it!

This game is smooth and easy to play cooperatively.  There’s a lot of engagement as players realize “we need to play this combo!!!” See above as Sara and Andrew try to figure out how to combo to take out the 3 Cat Cards!

The game was still about 20-25 minutes and moved quickly.  This game was easy to learn and pretty fun to play.

What I Liked

The art is adorable.  And the cards are easy to read.

The game is super easy to set-up and understand.

It worked well as both a cooperative game and a solo game.

In the end, the gameplay was just so smoooooth and easy. Anyone can play this.

The combo mechanism is fantastic: it reminds of the “follow” mechanism that so enchanted us from the Plum Island Horror (see our review here).  By allowing ANY player to play a Human Card that matches the current symbol, everyone can stay engaged even when it’s not their turn!  This one mechanism made this fairly standard cooperative game stand out for me: it kept everyone engaged!

What I Didn’t Like

There aren’t enough Human Cards. You will see all of them in your first game! There needs to be quite a bit more for better variety.

I don’t love the cover, but I was absolutely in the minority on this. I think the art is so cute in the game (see the Ball With Bell above), but I don’t think the cover captured just how cute this game is! Again, I am in the minority: all my friends disagree with me on this.

I don’t love the pamphlet form factor. Whatever, it’s still a pretty good set of rules.

It’s not super deep. You’ll get it pretty quickly: that may limit its replayability.

Conclusion

Hissy Fit! is surprisingly fun! It’s a light game that’s easy to teach: you can teach and start playing right away! This is a quick solo and cooperative game that plays in about 20 minutes! Are you looking for a light and quick solo/cooperative game? Hissy Fit! might be right for you!

And you don’t have to love cats to like this game: the gameplay is solid, especially with the combo mechanism keeping everyone engaged as they play!   The gameplay is just smooth.

I give this a solid 7.5/10 and Teresa gives this a 7/10. Andrew and Sara would give it a 7, but the small number of Human Cards reduces some of the replayability for them, so they give it a 6.5/10. I think an expansion which added a lot more Human Cards would move this to a 7/10 for them.

This small game has a sense of humor and a wacky theme, but it plays so smoothly.  It’s a surprise to me how much I liked Hissy Fit! given how weird and quirky it is.  Yes, I got my money’s worth for $20.