One monastery. Too many cats.
Night has settled over a rambling medieval monastery, but there will be no peace for Pope Leo IX. His cats are loose among the cloisters, kitchens, chapels, and hidden passages. Every time he draws near, another door slams shut and another tail disappears around a corner.
You are one of those cats. Your goal is not simply to escape, but to make the chase your own: lure the Pope toward your rivals, tempt him into opening the doors you have barred, and remain gloriously ungovernable longer than anyone else.
A chase you build together
Each Cat darts through the monastery, locks doors, and contributes a movement token to the Pope’s route. Then the full plan springs to life, sending him careening from room to room in pursuit. When the round ends, that route is scrambled and expanded. The plan you helped create keeps returning in new and increasingly chaotic forms.
Core mechanics
- Easy choices, tangled consequences: move, lock a door, and choose one instruction for the Pope.
- A pursuit with a memory: the movement plan grows every round, but its order never stays predictable.
- Competition to the last Cat: score when the Pope opens your doors and by surviving longer than your rivals.
Even capture does not end your influence. You keep feeding instructions into the chase, giving every player a hand in the monastery’s mounting chaos until the final Cat is caught.
An award-winning chase
Shepherding Cats won the 2026 RageCon Game Design Competition and is now in playtesting. It is a lively tabletop game of prediction, opportunism, and the familiar impossibility of persuading a cat to go where it is supposed to.
