Review: Anima Press – Mew-Tants!


Mew-Tants!
Mew-Tants! is a low fantasy role-playing game written by Aled Lawlor and published by Anima Press.
By Aaron T. Huss

Learn more about Mew-Tants! here
Purchase Mew-Tants! here (paid link)
Find other Mew-Tants! posts here

Mew-Tants! is a recently released Zine-design RPG funded through Kickstarter. It is effectively low fantasy where you take on the role of a cat with a superpower. While this may seem overly mundane, it’s fairly tongue-in-cheek satirical playing off the common stereotypes of cats… and then turning them into superpowers. A perfect example is “If I Fits, I Sits” that allows the cat to change shape to an object it can enter into. It’s almost like taking every funny cat meme on social media and turning it into a role-playing game. Everything is from the perspective of a cat and the designer takes many liberties to represent cat life – napping, eating, boredom, and not caring about things while also being superpowered. Reading through it made me smile, it made me laugh, it just generally sounds like a good time!

As a father of seven children, four of them 10 and under, I immediately thought how much fun this game would be to play with my kids! That was until I consumed the mechanics and noticed one of the cats’ attributes is called “Fucks” (as in how many fucks do you have to give). They literally could have use the term “care” or something as equally mundane, but they didn’t. Yes it fits with the tongue-in-cheek comedic style of the game, but it immediately turned me away and possibly loses potential players who would love to run this fun game with their kids. Maybe they could make an “All Ages” version or at least create an “All Ages” character sheet that can be handed out to children and then run the game anyway.

The book itself is great. The artwork is fun and the design is simple and clean. The adventure included with the game is actually perfect in that it demonstrates the potential of the game and how these adventures would play out. It’s definitely complete in such a short number of pages and deserves at least an opportunity to sway your opinion of what it would be like to play a cat in an RPG.

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