Bookshelf Family Party Game Review

29 June 2026

Alley Cat Games’s small-tin dexterity game is a super stacker

Alley Cat’s other new tin dexterity game, Bookshelf, skips the puns but offers up plenty of drama. It attempts to combine two opposing forces: the human desire to arrange hardback books on shelves in an aesthetically-pleasing manner; and the feline desire to push them off again.

How to play Bookshelf

Players work together to place little wooden books, stack cards on top of those books to create shelves, then accommodate a pesky but cute cat who insists on sprawling all over your beautiful display.

Each turn, you’re going to take a card that shows you which books to stack this round. Together with your fellow players, you try to place these simultaneously, using spots marked on the card below, before retrieving the cat from the previous shelf and moving it one level up. If you manage to do all of this without your tower collapsing, you move onto the next round. Reach eight storeys, and your team wins.

The most obvious comparison is Haba’s Rhino Hero, which combines card stacking with placing a heavy rhino meeple on increasingly high levels of a building. Rhino Hero is justly regarded as a classic – simple, taut, very funny – so it’s a surprise to discover that Bookshelf not only lives up to these high expectations, but might – whisper it – be better!

The game’s cooperative nature is at the heart of this enjoyment, although the way the artwork and components realise the cosy theme helps too. Each round, you’re collaborating on this ever-shakier exercise in Babel-esque hubris. You groan together when you fail, cheer together when you place the cat and the stack holds. Normal and hard modes let you tweak the challenge, and the mix of cards and blocks provides both tactile and tactical pleasures.

Review by Tim Clare