Wouter & Ymke 
Every year, the Felinor School of Witchcraft and Wizardry hosts the Great Magic Cat Tournament, where four clans compete to prove who is best at throwing magic around. There are orange tabbies controlling the wind, cats carrying staffs, cats playing with fire and, because apparently normal magic wasn’t enough, a clan experimenting with some rather suspicious-looking sparks. It’s a colourful setting that immediately tells you not to take any of this too seriously.
In Magicats, each player controls one of these clans. Before anyone starts fighting, you’ll place your wizards around the school and decide which magic they should learn. Then the tournament begins and those carefully prepared cats start attacking each other. You spend the first part creating wizards you’re rather pleased with. The second part is mostly everyone else trying to take them apart. Given that these are cats, I suppose expecting them to follow the plan was optimistic to begin with. If Magicats is on your list for Spiel Essen ’26, where Korea Boardgames will be showing the game, here’s how our own little tournament went.
👥 2-4 players, ages 10+
⏳️ Playing time: 40 minutes
📝 Designer: Reiner Knizia
🎨 Artwork: Jihwan Ha
🏢 Publisher: Korea Boardgames (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Magicats is played in two phases: preparation followed by battle. During preparation, players take turns placing their wizards on the shared grid and taking magic tokens from a common display. You don’t necessarily have to place a new wizard every turn. If one of your cats already on the board still has an empty magic slot, you can skip placing another one and add magic to that wizard instead. If you do bring out a new wizard, the magic you take that turn has to go to it.
There are restrictions on where new wizards can go. You can’t place one in the same unobstructed horizontal or vertical line as another wizard from your own clan. An opponent or a bookshelf between them breaks that line and makes the placement possible. Each wizard can eventually hold four magic tokens, sitting in the spaces around its circular base. Once every wizard is out and all those spaces are filled, it’s time to fight.
There are eleven types of magic, and you can give a wizard several copies of the same one. Some add dice to particular attacks. Others affect who rolls first, let you reroll dice, block damage, interfere with an opponent or deal damage directly. They’re all taken from the same display, so whatever you leave behind is available to everyone else.
During battle, you may move one of your wizards up to four spaces horizontally or vertically. You can’t move diagonally or through other wizards and bookshelves. If you move, you need to finish somewhere that allows that wizard to attack. Adjacent wizards fight in melee. Further apart, they can have a ranged battle if they’re in the same horizontal or vertical line without another wizard or bookshelf between them. Some magic changes how you get around the board, including one that lets a wizard jump directly to a space from which it can attack.
Moving is optional. Fighting isn’t. If none of your wizards can reach an opponent through normal movement, you have to jump one of them to an empty space from which it can attack. The relevant magic is then resolved in a fixed order, followed by the dice and any defensive effects.
The first damage a wizard takes puts a damage token on its base. The next damage removes that token and also makes the wizard lose one of its magic tokens. That token becomes a trophy for the player who dealt the damage. The same process continues until a wizard loses its final magic token and is eliminated.
The game ends when only one clan remains on the board, or if nobody remains. The last player standing adds their surviving wizards and magic tokens to their trophies, then everyone counts what they’ve collected. Whoever has the most trophies wins. Being the final clan left certainly helps, but it doesn’t automatically make you the winner.
Artwork & Components
Magicats looks pretty much how I’d expect a game about wizard cats to look. Everything is exaggerated and slightly silly, with cats in robes carrying staffs, books and glowing bits of magic. The four clans use different colours, and I particularly like that the sixteen wizard standees aren’t just the same few characters repeated in different player colours.
I also really like the large circular stands. Each has four spaces where the magic tokens fit around the wizard. As you collect magic, the cat physically fills up with abilities without needing a separate player board or row of cards.
It makes other players’ cats very easy to inspect as well. You can look across the table and see that somebody has been putting together a slightly alarming collection of powers.
The board consists of four large double-sided pieces. One side shows the inside of the school, with pale floors, scattered books and bookshelves breaking up the grid. Flip them over and the tournament moves outdoors, with forests, mountains, shrines, rivers and lakes. These aren’t only illustrations. The terrain has its own effects, changing what can happen around mountains, forests and shrines, with water restricting movement.
There are also 52 magic tokens, damage and distraction tokens, a long magic display and six custom black dice. The dice use red and blue paw prints instead of normal numbers, which suits the rest of the artwork. We never had much trouble telling the magic tokens or clans apart. Four players do put a lot of large circular bases onto the board, though. That neat school grid doesn’t stay neat for very long.
Our Experience
Our first game was mostly spent looking at our own cats. We understood what the powers did, started putting combinations together and were generally quite happy with what we were building. One player was working on a ranged wizard, somebody else was adding protection, and the rest of us were doing our own thing.
Then we noticed one cat on the other side of the table.
It had collected a combination that looked considerably nastier than anything else out there. Its owner naturally disagreed and gave us several excellent reasons why we should be attacking each other instead.
Nobody was particularly convinced.
By the second game, everyone was watching the magic display a lot more closely. Sometimes I wanted a token because it worked with my own wizard. Sometimes I didn’t particularly need it. I just didn’t want to leave another copy sitting there for someone who was already building something unpleasant.
The beginning of preparation is where we spent most of our time considering those choices. Near the end, with fewer empty spaces and fewer useful combinations available, the decisions weren’t as interesting. Sometimes you’re basically looking for something decent enough to finish a cat.
And then there’s the temptation to put everything good on one wizard. We did that too. A cat with several powers working together looks great sitting in front of you. It looks slightly less great when three other players stare at it for a few seconds and someone says, “So… we’re all attacking that one, right?”
Positioning caught us out a few times. During our first game, we spent quite some time trying to find safe spaces and good lines for ranged attacks. Then somebody jumped across the board, another wizard got in the way, and suddenly that perfect position wasn’t particularly perfect anymore.
We stopped planning several turns ahead after a while. With three other players moving around the same grid, that mostly gave them three opportunities to ruin whatever we’d planned.
Four players was easily my favourite way to play. At two, everything was much more direct. You know who you’re attacking and you know who’s coming after you. With four, there was always somebody explaining why another player’s wizard was clearly the real problem. “You should attack him because…” became a fairly normal start to a sentence, usually followed by a completely unbiased explanation of why the speaker’s own cats should be ignored.
Those little agreements rarely lasted. A weakened wizard was suddenly tempting, someone collected an unfortunate combination of magic, or the person who had just helped you became the easiest target on your next turn. Eventually all the talking has to result in an attack anyway. The game doesn’t let you spend the afternoon hiding behind a bookshelf.
And then there were the dice.
We had attacks where everything looked right and the roll was terrible. We also had fairly ordinary cats survive much longer than they had any business surviving. I found some of those situations hilarious. The person who had spent several turns trying to kill that particular wizard didn’t always agree.
After a few games, nobody at our table really expected the dice to cooperate anymore. There was usually a small pause before a particularly important roll. Followed, quite often, by somebody complaining about paw prints.
Our Thoughts
One thing I really like about Magicats is how easy it is to look across the board and understand why a particular cat might be a problem. You can see which ones are becoming dangerous, which have already been damaged and roughly what everyone is trying to build. There’s no hand of hidden cards to remember and no need to keep asking another player what their wizard can do. Most of what matters is sitting right there around its feet.
After a few games, we were certainly better at recognising which magic tokens belonged together and which cats needed dealing with early. Knowing that doesn’t give you control over combat. That’s where I think the dice will decide whether Magicats is for you.
A well-prepared attack can fail badly. That’s just part of the game, and I wouldn’t choose this when I’m in the mood for a skirmish where careful planning should produce fairly dependable results. There were attacks where one of us had done everything reasonably well and got almost nothing from it. Sometimes that’s funny. Sometimes you just wanted the bloody cat to take damage.
At least turns don’t involve long chains of calculations beforehand. For me, that makes those failed rolls much easier to accept. If randomness in combat tends to bother you regardless, I don’t think playing Magicats more often is going to change your mind.
I’m less sure about how often we’ll return to it once we’ve tried most of the magic combinations. There are still things I’d like to experiment with, and I definitely haven’t built every cat the way I’d like to yet. The outdoor battlefield gives us another version of the board to mess around with.
I don’t expect some completely different game to appear after another ten plays, though. The clans don’t have their own rules or wildly different ways of playing. Eventually you’re going to know what the eleven types of magic do and which ones you like putting together. Players looking for highly asymmetric characters or a skirmish system they can keep digging into for dozens of sessions will probably want more.
There’s also player elimination. Once your last wizard disappears, you’re done taking turns, even though the trophies you’ve already collected still count towards the final result. Some groups will hate that. In our games the remaining cats tended to disappear quickly enough because everyone had to keep attacking, so we weren’t sitting around for ages waiting for the game to finish.
What I keep coming back to is those wizard bases slowly filling up with magic. I like putting together a cat that does something specific, then looking across the table and realising somebody else’s cat has become a problem. With four players, everyone else has usually noticed it too. That’s when the questionable diplomacy starts.
Four players is definitely how I’d choose to play Magicats. That’s where it felt most like the silly magical tournament it looks like, with everyone arguing about which wizard deserves to be attacked and the dice occasionally embarrassing whoever sounded most confident.
It’s not what I’d put on the table when we want to calculate every move several turns ahead. When we want to build some ridiculous wizard cats and then spend the next half hour ruining each other’s work, I can definitely see us bringing this one out again.
📝 We received a review copy of Magicats from Korea Boardgames.
Heading to Spiel Essen ’26? You’ll be able to try Magicats there with Korea Boardgames.
You can also find all of our pre-Spiel ’26 coverage here.
