Thoughts on Reading John Wick's Cat

Cat is the third John Wick game that I have read, and like all of his other books, this one is an enjoyable read.  Wick exceeds at creating clever worlds with strong interior logic and humor.  Cat reminds me of Orkworld in that the big lure of the game to me is less in its mechanical workings and more in its fictional setup.
 
Cat is about “cats who protect their owners from monsters they can’t see.”  Players play cats in our real world whose owners suffer from the insidious attacks of Boggins.  Boggins are invisible to human eyes, and in the game, they are the physical representations of the troubles we experience—self doubt, depression, guilt, worry, etc.  In putting together the world, Wick makes sense of the odd and funny behavior of cats and dogs and humans.  It is a lovingly created game and a love song to the cats in our lives and our special relationships with them.
 
The mechanics of the game are simple and functional.  Characters have a set of stats that cover the various actions cats might do in any given session.  Cats have special traits called “reputations” that help them do those tasks.  Between their trait dice and their reputation dice and any advantage dice they might pick up from narrative positioning or GM good will, the player puts together a pool of dice to see if their cat succeeds at their risky task.  Evens rolled designate a success; odds denote a failure.  The player counts up their number of successes and see if they meet the number needed.  Worse comes to worst, players can use one of their cats starting nine lives to guarantee an automatic success.
 
There are rules for fighting, suffering wounds, and healing.  There is a subsystem for magic and a set of 8 tricks (cats perform tricks with magic, not cast spells) that can do things like make you always land on your feet or magically slip through a closed door.
 
The rules are simple, designed to allow for improvisational play by both the players and the GM (whose roll is called “the narrator”).  The game text comes with several starting situations with the idea that little other preparation is required to move into play.  Everything else, then, just needs to be functional and easily applied to make play as smooth as possible.  Players are here to be cats, not to marvel at the mechanics of the game.
 
That said, there is one mechanism that I find clever.  Cats get scars as their form of injury.  The way you determine your scars is this.  After you roll, if you don’t have enough evens (successes) to overcome your task, and if the failure risks injury in one form or another, then you look at your dice pool and find the lowest odd number that you rolled.  That number is the number of scars that you take.  This little device seems to be the reason to use even and odds (rather than, say, the more common 4 and up versus 3 and under).  I have never seen that done before, and it makes the system of odds and evens worth it.  If you roll a large pool & you surprisingly fail, you’re likely to have a low odd so the scars are minimal.  When you only roll a few dice, the chances for large scars is more subject to the swing and luck of the dice.
 

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