Catcrawl - Starter guide
What is Catcrawl?
Catcrawl is a roleplaying game about being a cat. You have just arrived in your new home, everything smells wrong, and nobody asked your permission for any of it. So you do what cats do: you explore. Room by room, shelf by shelf, you decide whether this becomes a cozy voyage of discovery or a trail of gentle destruction ending in a knocked-over plant.
It is a game without a game master, for one to four players, and it is exactly as soft as it sounds. No preparation, no experience needed, no wrong answers. When the exploring is done, the cat curls up for a nap, and that is the ending. Every time.
Catcrawl was designed by Jasmin Neitzel and Andrea Rick and published by Plotbunny Games, an award-winning indie studio from Berlin. The edition Netherbook carries is a 28 page A5 zine containing everything: the rules, the prompt lists, an apartment map of 24 squares, cut-out cat minis and more than 35 hand-drawn cat illustrations.
How does the system work?
Catcrawl crosses a hexcrawl with a story game. The apartment map is your dungeon: 24 squares of hallway, kitchen, windowsill and forbidden bedroom, each with its own prompts. The cat mini moves across the map square by square, and every square asks the table a question worth answering.
The clever part is how the table shares the work. You take turns playing the cat, while the others describe the rooms and narrate the consequences of whatever the cat just decided to do. Everyone gets to be the cat, and everyone gets to be the apartment. Solo, you simply hold both jobs and let the prompts carry you.
There is nothing to optimise and nothing to win. The game ends when the cat has seen enough and settles down to sleep, which means a session naturally lasts as long as your evening wants it to: half an hour after dinner or three hours on a rainy Sunday.
What do you need to start?
The zine is the whole game: map, minis, rules and prompts in one A5 booklet. Bring a pencil, perhaps a snack, and one to three friends, or nobody at all. There is genuinely nothing to prepare.
It is also a lovely game to play with children, and a gentle first roleplaying game for anyone who finds character sheets intimidating: if you can imagine what a cat would do on a bookshelf, you are qualified.
Who is this game for?
Catcrawl is for players who want their games soft: solo players winding down after a long day, groups wanting a light one-shot between heavier campaigns, parents playing with kids, and anyone who has ever watched a cat enter a new room and wondered what was going on in there. It is also, quietly, a fine icebreaker for people who have never roleplayed before.
It is honest to say who it is not for. There is no combat, no character progression, no dice-driven tension and no stakes bigger than a vase. If your table needs danger or victory to stay interested, this catnap of a game will feel too gentle. That gentleness is not a flaw; it is the entire point.
How does it compare to other systems?
Compared to Dungeons & Dragons, Catcrawl removes almost everything: the game master, the campaign, the conflict. What remains is the oldest part of the hobby, describing a place together and wanting to know what is behind the next door. Or under the sofa.
Wanderhome is its closest relative on our shelves: both are gentle, GM-less games about travelling through a world with curiosity instead of a sword. Wanderhome walks a whole pastoral kingdom with a troupe of animal folk; Catcrawl gives you one cat, one apartment, one afternoon.
And Mausritter shows the other way to be a small animal in a big world: a proper old school adventure game where mice carry swords and the cat is the boss monster. In Catcrawl, you are the boss monster, and all you want is a sunbeam.
Where do you start?
Open the zine, lay out the map, stand your cat mini on the doormat and read the first prompt aloud. That is the whole onboarding. Within two minutes someone is describing the smell of the hallway.
One piece of advice: say yes to each other's details. The game runs on small observations, the humming fridge, the crack under the cellar door, the curtain that must be climbed, and it is at its best when every player adds a whisker of their own. Then let the cat nap. You have earned it together.
Recommended products at Netherbook
Catcrawl is complete in one zine: rules, map, minis and a great many cats.
If playing alone suits you, the Solo & Journaling collection gathers every game in the shop you can play on your own, and The Librarian's Apprentice is a fine next step: another gentle solo game, though its library has considerably more teeth than your new apartment.