Trap The Cat

Trap The Cat is a puzzle game with one of the oldest and best designs on the web: a hexagonal board, a cat, and a very small number of moves. It runs in the browser — no download, no account, no install.

You and the cat take turns. Each turn you block one hex with a dot; each turn the cat moves one hex closer to the edge. If it reaches the border, you lose. If you can wall it in first, you win. That is the entire rule set, and it produces a game that is easy to understand and genuinely difficult to play well.

The cat is not random. Its movement is deterministic, which is what makes the puzzle legitimate: there is a correct sequence of blocks for any position, and losing means you spent a dot in the wrong place several turns earlier. Later boards start the cat closer to freedom, shrinking your margin for error, and the game stops being about reaction entirely — it is arithmetic, done in your head, against a very patient opponent.

It is a click or tap game and plays identically on a phone and a desktop.

On cool games spot this page is the index entry: cover, description, and search terms. The game itself is loaded from a third-party web build in an iframe on Play, so nothing is bundled into the site. It is filed under arcade and tagged puzzle, so it appears alongside the rest of the puzzle games in the catalog.

Press Play and find out.