The fonts used are Puss in Boots (headings, fancy text) and Catcafe (body text, readable). Both freely available online. Parts of the illustrations were generated with AI. Everything else is mine.

This game has two spin-offs!

• Nine Lives: Math Meows: the same game that you love, but now with more depth. It’s a little more mathematical and requires players to read English text (on the Life Cards).
• Nine Lives: Tricksy Kittens: also the same core mechanic, but now as a trick-taking game.

This idea started right after writing down (and completing) some other ideas for card games based around numbers and animals. Somehow, while exercising, my brain made a connection between the two: “what if you played a cat with nine lives, and losing a trick made you lose a life?”

(Yes, the original idea was the one with tricks, and then the one with numbers. What is now the “base game” is actually the third idea, once I realized how to simplify the game even further. That’s not special: that’s how it always goes. Making something teaches you how to make it simpler next time.)

This snowballed into three ideas with the same core, but different directions. All of them were immediately simple and fun enough that I found it worthwhile to create them all, basically back-to-back.

Do you have a favorite version of Nine Lives? Let me know which one and why!

For more information, as always, read my detailed developer diary on Pandaqi Blog.