Can’t Catch Harry is a recently fulfilled Kickstarter project from James Rallison. Rallison is better known as the talent behind the animated YouTube channel Odd 1s Out. The design of the game is cute, and the packaging is great. The game itself looks fun: with bright colors and wonderful moth pieces, which little kids should find appealing to look at when playing. But the mechanics have issues and an overall lack of game rules make the game more complicated than it should be for something that looks very simple.
The card play is supposed to be fast and frantic, and the game mechanic has you passing cards to the player clockwise to you. The goal is to collect a set of four: 4 furries, 4 teachers, 4 Harrys for example. When one player has four matching cards, it’s moth rescue time and there’s a mad rush to pick up the bug models. If you catch Harry, you score the most points. If you’re left with the lantern, then you lose points.
The game is over once someone has 11 points. Can’t Catch Harry does that thing where you need to score exactly 11 points to win. If you go over, then you score no points for that round, and have to try again. And depending on how you shuffled the cards this could go on a bit. But sooner or later someone will get a set of four and the race is on again.
The card art is great. Fun and very creative with their design and are full of color and humor. The art is very on brand for the world Rallison has created. The figures are a strong plastic that is hard but also somewhat soft, so they won’t hurt that bad if you step on them after a kid leaves them out. They’re very cute and have funny expressions.
During game play questions came up that the rules could not answer. The rule sheet is one page, front and back, small font and lots of pictures. The rules may be so simple the creators may have not worried about people having questions about the game play. But when my group couldn’t answer the question, the game more or less stopped. We pressed on and just ended up making house rules. It unfortunately affected the overall joy of the game.
Verdict
Not a bad game in any way, and I’m sure kids will love it. Or if you are a super fan of James Rallison and his YouTube channel Odd 1s Out, you’ll love it too. The design is super cute and the pieces are wonderfully made. Overall a 3 out of 5.
Game: Can’t Catch Harry
Publisher: Breaking Games
Price: $19.99
Players: 2-6
Duration: 10-20 minutes
Ages: 6+
Time to Learn: 5 minutes
