Wouter & Ymke 
You’ve made a set of new blankets for your cats. That sounds like a nice thing to do, but the cats don’t agree. They miss the patterns on their old blankets, and now it’s apparently your job to recreate them before the complaining starts. I mean, that seems about right for cats.
In Blancat, everyone gets a strange little board covered in long coloured strips and tries to fold those strips into the pattern shown on a card. Everyone works at the same time, and there are fewer cat tokens than players, so eventually you have to stop checking your work and decide whether you’re confident enough to grab one. We thought this would mostly be a quick pattern-matching game. It is, in a way, but getting your eyes, brain and fingers to agree on the solution turned out to be the more interesting part. Blancat is currently heading towards its wider release in Q4 2026 and will also be at Spiel Essen ’26 with Korea Boardgames.
👥 2-4 players, ages 8+
⏳️ Playing time: 20 minutes
📝 Designer: Nutgoo.Lee
🎨 Artwork: Luna Vargas
🏢 Publisher: Korea Boardgames (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Each player starts with a player board made up of twelve flexible strands in red, yellow and turquoise, with three strands extending from each side. You also choose which set of goal cards to use. There are twenty easy patterns and twenty hard ones, and the chosen set is shuffled into a deck. Finally, you place one fewer cat token in the middle of the table than there are players.
At the start of a round, you reveal the top goal card. Everyone immediately begins folding all twelve strands inwards to recreate the coloured pattern shown on that card. There are no turns, so everyone is folding, overlapping and threading their strands at the same time.
Once you think your pattern is finished, you shout “Blancat!” and take one of the available cat tokens. That also means you’re done. You can’t change anything on your board afterwards, even if you look down two seconds later and suddenly realise that the red square in the corner looks very suspicious. You also can’t return your cat token. The remaining players continue until there are no cats left, leaving one player without a token.
Then everyone checks their patterns. If all players who took a cat have recreated the pattern correctly, the player without a cat receives a penalty. If any of the players with a cat made a mistake, those incorrect players receive penalties instead. In that case, the player without a cat gets away with being slower.
Penalties are tracked by taking a goal card from the deck and placing it face-down in front of you. Once someone has collected three penalties, the game ends. That player loses and everyone else shares the victory.
There’s also a variant called Cable Blancat. The basic goal stays the same, but now every strand must be partially or fully threaded underneath another strand. Your finished blanket should be connected well enough that it doesn’t unravel if you turn the board upside down. The rules also allow you to give this restriction only to experienced players, while others continue playing normally.
Artwork & Components
The player boards were the first thing that caught our attention because they’re not really boards in the usual sense. Each one has twelve long flexible strips sticking out from the centre, ready to be folded inwards. As you fold them across each other, the flat board gradually turns into something that actually resembles the patchwork blanket you’re supposed to be making. From the sides it can look like a bit of a mess, while from above you get this surprisingly tidy grid of colours.
Everything uses the same red, yellow and turquoise colour scheme, with little paw prints and other details printed across the strands. The goal cards show their patterns as simple coloured grids, with scissors, thread and other sewing details around the edges. Those decorations stay out of the way of the pattern you actually need to read. The easy and hard cards have different backs too, which keeps the two sets easy to separate.
And then there are the cats. You get three chunky cat-shaped tokens, each with a different illustration, and they’re thick enough to stand upright on the table. Their colour and shape don’t matter during play, but they’re much nicer to grab than three generic markers would have been. They also look slightly judgemental when you discover that the pattern underneath them is wrong, although that might just be me projecting.
Our Experience
Our first rounds were mostly spent figuring out how to make our hands do what our eyes were telling them. We could look at a goal card and understand the pattern fairly quickly, but turning that into the right folds wasn’t always as straightforward. We’d reach for a red strand, realise we actually needed the one coming from the opposite side, move something else first and then somehow cover the square we’d just fixed.
There was quite a bit of unfolding and muttering.
That didn’t last very long. After a couple of rounds, the easy cards weren’t giving us much trouble anymore, so we moved to the hard set and stayed there. We also stopped immediately folding the first strand that looked useful. Sometimes we’d stare at the card for a second before touching anything, because starting with the wrong strip could leave you fighting your own blanket later. By then we were already thinking a little further ahead instead of just reacting to each coloured square.
The cats were where things got less sensible. Someone would shout “Blancat!”, grab one with far too much confidence, and everyone else would immediately start moving faster. Then we’d check the patterns and find that the person who caused all that rush had one red square completely wrong. After that happened a few times, we became a little less impressed when somebody grabbed the first cat. They’d committed, sure. Whether they’d actually finished was something we’d find out later.
There was also that moment before grabbing a cat ourselves. You’d think the blanket was correct, look at it again, glance at the remaining cats and wonder whether one more check was worth it. Sometimes the last cat disappeared while we were still checking. One of us tended to grab quickly and hope for the best, while another could apparently inspect the same corner indefinitely.
We preferred all of this with three or four players. With two, there’s only one cat between you, and our games became much more direct races. With more people, one cat could disappear without immediately ending everything. Once another went, though, we usually started moving a bit faster. There were also more chances that somebody who had already grabbed a cat was wrong, which occasionally saved the person still wrestling with their final strip.
Once we tried Cable Blancat, we didn’t really want to go back to the normal version for ourselves. By then we were comfortable with moving the strands, and having to thread every one underneath another changed how we approached the board. We had a few blankets that looked perfectly correct from above but failed the upside-down test rather badly. Apparently our cats care about structural integrity as well as colour coordination.
Our Thoughts
Moving the strips quickly only gets you so far in Blancat. You need to read the pattern, work out which strands can create it and then actually get them there without covering something that should remain visible. The target itself is rarely difficult to understand. You can see exactly what you’re supposed to make. It’s the physical translation of that picture that gave us more to think about.
Finishing first isn’t really the objective either. There are no points waiting for the person who beats everyone else by five seconds. You need to finish before the cats are gone, but you also need to be correct, and someone consistently finishing somewhere in the middle can do perfectly well if the faster players keep making mistakes. Being cautious has its limits. At some point you have to stop staring at that yellow square and take the cat.
A large difference in ability between players is harder to get around. The penalty system catches somebody who is fast but careless, but it does very little against somebody who is both considerably faster and consistently accurate. Cable Blancat can be given only to more experienced players, which helps, although I wouldn’t expect it to completely fix a large skill gap.
Then there are the forty goal cards. Seeing a hard pattern again isn’t necessarily a wasted round because you can still find a quicker or less awkward way to construct it. Eventually, though, you’re going to recognise some of them, and there’s only so much variety within this particular puzzle. We haven’t reached the point where that became a problem, but I can see it happening if Blancat comes out very regularly.
I’m less sure what to make of the player boards over the longer term. Ours started showing some creases after only a few sessions. They still work perfectly well, and maybe they’ll continue doing so for a long time, but folding those strips repeatedly is the entire game. We simply haven’t played enough yet to know how they’ll look and feel after twenty or thirty plays.
I think Blancat makes most sense around tables where people already enjoy visual or hands-on puzzles and don’t mind having to work quickly. I can see children and adults playing together, especially since Cable Blancat can be given only to whoever needs the extra challenge. If timed games make you miserable, watching other people grab cats while you’re still trying to sort out your strips probably isn’t going to help. A big difference in spatial ability between players could be awkward too.
There’s also something satisfying about the puzzle without the race. Blancat doesn’t have an official solo mode, but I could easily see myself taking a goal card and working through it without cats, penalties or anyone waiting for me to mess up. Sometimes just figuring out where those strips need to go is enough.
For us, though, we preferred three or four players, the hard cards and Cable Blancat once everyone knew what they were doing. That was where we settled after our plays, and we usually wanted to try one more pattern before putting everything back in the box.
📝 We received a copy of Blancat from Korea Boardgames.
Going to Spiel Essen ’26? Blancat will be available to try with Korea Boardgames.
You can also find our other Spiel ’26 reviews here.
