Wouter & Ymke 
Put a pile of colourful gems in front of us and apparently our first instinct is to steal them. At least, that’s what Meow Heist expects us to do. We’re all cat burglars trying to empty a series of safes, collect the most valuable gems and, preferably, leave the black rocks for somebody else.
The idea is easy enough. You secretly choose how many gems you want to steal, but everyone else is making that same choice. Pick a number nobody else has played and you visit the safe. Match someone who revealed before you and you steal their loot instead. So what starts as a question of “how many gems do I want?” soon becomes “which number are you choosing?” Judging by the suspicious looks around our table, apparently none of us can be trusted.
👥 2-6 players, ages 6+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Designer: Ibuink
🎨 Artwork: Kansame9
🏢 Publisher: Nekuma Studio (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
A game of Meow Heist is played over several rounds, with the number of rounds depending on the player count. At the start of each round, the start player reveals a safe card and draws the indicated number of gems from the cloth bag. These become the loot for that round. Red gems are worth three points, yellow gems two and blue gems one.
Everyone then secretly chooses one of their available cat cards and places it face down. The cards are numbered from 1 to 6, although some values appear more than once depending on the number of players. Your chosen number determines how many gems you’re trying to steal. Before anything is revealed, everyone is free to talk. You can negotiate, bluff, make promises or simply lie about what you’re planning. All perfectly acceptable behaviour for a group of cats breaking into safes.
Starting with the start player and continuing clockwise, everyone reveals their card. The rulebook also tells you to say “MEOW!” when you do this, which is important information I couldn’t possibly leave out. If nobody before you has revealed the same number, you take that many gems from the safe. You must always take the most valuable gems first, so red before yellow and yellow before blue. If there aren’t enough gems left, you take black rocks for anything you’re missing, and each of those costs you one point at the end of the game.
Matching a number changes what happens. Instead of taking anything from the safe, you steal all the gems and black rocks from the player who most recently revealed that same number. If a third player later reveals it, the whole pile changes hands again. Nothing is safe until the round is actually finished.
With three to six players, your used cat card is set aside face down at the end of the round and can’t be used again. This gradually reduces the numbers you have available. Any gems and rocks still sitting on your card go behind your player shield, while anything left in the safe is removed. The start player then moves clockwise and a new safe is opened.
Two players works differently. Each player has six cat cards numbered 1 to 6, and the game lasts four rounds. You play one card in the first round, two in the second, three in the third and four in the final round. Players alternate revealing one card at a time, choosing their own reveal order when they have several cards waiting. At the end of each round, all six cards return to you.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
Meow Heist isn’t shy about the cat theme. Each player gets their own feline burglar, dressed in the sort of outfit you’d probably question if you saw a cat wearing it outside your house at two in the morning. The characters appear on the player shields and cards, with each set using its own colour.
The cat cards are large, colourful and easy to read across the table. That’s useful because you’re regularly checking which numbers have appeared during the current round. The safe cards are much simpler, mostly because they only need to tell you how many gems to pull from the bag.
The gems were the first components our kids noticed, and honestly, I get it. There are 100 translucent plastic gems in red, yellow and blue, all with chunky faceted shapes. The black rocks are similarly chunky but opaque, which makes them easy to separate from the actual treasure. Using physical gems works particularly well when somebody steals from you. They’re actually picking up the pile you just collected and moving it across the table, which feels considerably better for the thief than it does for the former owner.
You also get a cloth bag, and a few cards used when the supply of individual rocks runs low. The shields hide everything you’ve already collected and include the gem values on the inside, which saved us from asking “yellow is two, right?” more times than I’d like to admit. Everything is straightforward to handle once it’s on the table, although those gems do have a habit of travelling further than intended when someone gets enthusiastic.
Our Experience
Our first few rounds were mostly about the gems. We saw red gems, decided we wanted those red gems, and picked numbers based on how much we hoped to take. Very sophisticated burglary. It didn’t take long before somebody stole a particularly nice pile, though, and after that we spent much more time looking at each other than simply calculating how many gems we wanted. A 5 might look great when several red gems are sitting in the safe, but whether it actually works depends just as much on what everybody else has chosen.
Turn order was something we underestimated at first as well. Revealing early meant getting first access to the best gems, which initially seemed like an obvious advantage. But that nice pile then had to survive everyone revealing after you. More than once, somebody happily collected several red gems only for another player to reveal the same number and take the whole lot. Being later didn’t let you change the card you’d already chosen, of course, but it did give you the possibility of stealing something that hadn’t even existed when everyone made their choice. After a couple of rounds, being first suddenly didn’t look quite as comfortable.
We also gradually realised that we were dealing with different kinds of information. The gems in front of us and the cards already revealed that round were easy to see. Previous cat cards were different. We’d all seen them when they were played, but once they were set aside face down, remembering them was up to us. Then there was the information we genuinely couldn’t know, such as everybody’s current selection and exactly how many points were hiding behind their shields. Early in our first game we mostly ignored that middle category. Later, someone saying “you can’t play a 6 anymore” would suddenly send everyone back through the previous rounds in their head.
That changed the way we guessed as a game progressed. At the beginning, there were enough possible cards that we were often making a prediction and hoping for the best. Later, we could sometimes rule numbers out completely. Remembering that somebody had already used their only 6 was easy enough. Remembering which duplicate 3s, 4s or 5s had disappeared was another matter. We certainly didn’t track everything perfectly, but even remembering part of it meant we weren’t relying only on someone’s suspicious facial expression.
The talking developed alongside all of this. Initially I was doing most of it, making very trustworthy statements about what I definitely wasn’t going to play. A little later the kids started doing exactly the same thing. At one point one of them was so specific about not choosing a 5 that the rest of us immediately became convinced it had to be a 5. It wasn’t. Apparently I’d taught them too well. Greed caused its own problems too. Several times somebody chose a large number only for earlier players to empty more of the safe than expected, leaving black rocks to make up the difference. Even better was watching somebody steal one of those piles and only afterwards count how many rocks they’d inherited along with the gems. The stealing wasn’t always the victory it first appeared to be.
Our Thoughts
What surprised me is how differently we looked at our choices towards the end of a game. The first few safes leave you with quite a few possible numbers to consider, so sometimes you’re simply making your best guess. By the later rounds, spent cards have removed some of those possibilities. I preferred those later rounds for that reason. We weren’t learning extra rules or dealing with new effects, but we had more information to use than we did when the first safe appeared.
Our main criticism is that not every successful steal feels earned. Someone can take your best pile because they worked out exactly what you were going to do, but they can also take it because they happened to choose the same number. Randomly drawn gems mean some safes matter more than others too, so an accidental match can occasionally have a large effect on the final score. We could laugh off most of those moments because the next round comes around soon enough, but losing a great pile to a completely accidental match isn’t always satisfying. If you like knowing that your good or bad result came from the choices you made, those accidental steals might frustrate you more than they did us.
How much you get from the bluffing will also depend heavily on who is sitting around the table. The rules allow everyone to negotiate, promise and lie, but they don’t give you any reason that you must talk. With people who enjoy trying to influence each other, those conversations become another source of information, even when the information is probably nonsense. With players who would rather choose their card and wait for the reveal, you’re left mostly with the numbers themselves. I don’t think you need a loud group, but you do need people who are interested in what everyone else might be doing.
I’m less certain about how often we’d want to play it. After a few plays, there aren’t many mechanical surprises left. You know what the numbers do, you know how stealing works, and there aren’t different character abilities or new card effects waiting for another play. What can change is how well you know the people you’re playing with. You might notice that somebody avoids the obvious high number, or that another player gets greedy whenever several red gems appear. Those little habits give you something new to consider when choosing your own card, although how long that remains interesting will probably depend on the group.
For us, Meow Heist makes most sense as a family game or something we can bring out when experienced and newer players are at the same table, without spending ages explaining what everyone needs to do. Nobody at our table had much trouble understanding their cards, while remembering what had already been played and deciding how much we trusted everyone else’s claims gave us something more to think about. I wouldn’t choose it for players who strongly dislike having things stolen from them or who want a lot of control over the final result. But our games became noticeably more enjoyable once everyone understood what they could learn from the other players and started using that against each other. We began by staring at the gems and ended up staring suspiciously across the table instead. I suspect that’s the part that will bring Meow Heist back to our table, even if it does mean giving our children another opportunity to lie to us about plastic gemstones.
You can find our other Spiel ’26 reviews here.
📝 We received a copy of Meow Heist from Nekuma Studio.
