Meow or Never

Meow or Never is a fast, UNO-shaped card game: play a card that matches or beats the last one played, swap a card out if you can't, and race to be the one holding the highest total when the last black cat lands. It looks good doing it — card flips and slides with a confident bit of CSS animation, and the rules are genuinely simple enough to pick up from a six-line list on the title screen.

The tap mechanic works — confirmed by reading the game's own state

Rather than trust the visual feedback alone, this was checked directly: the game exposes its internal draw-pile counter, and reading it before and after a real touch tap on the current player's card showed the count actually drop, confirming a tap genuinely plays a card and advances the game rather than just looking like it does. That's the right bar for this shelf, and it clears it. Separately, this review found and fixed a real bug in the shipped build: the page ships with no character-encoding declaration at all, so a browser falls back to a legacy default and renders the game's own "≥" and curly apostrophes as garbled symbols — confirmed by inspecting the raw file bytes, which are correctly UTF-8 encoded but simply never told the browser so. Adding the missing <meta charset="utf-8"> tag during installation fixed it, verified afterward by reading the rendered page text directly.

What the mechanic can't fix

None of that solves the problem several of the competition's own judges hit immediately: there is no way to play this alone. The menu offers a choice of 2, 3 or 4 players and nothing else — no single-player mode, no computer opponent — meaning a solo visitor arriving on this shelf, which is built around a phone and a thumb, cannot actually play a complete game without physically handing their device to other people. Independent comments on the competition page describe exactly this: "I was not able to play against the computer and I had to play both players," "not a lot of fun for a single player... could have at least some kind of simple simulated opponent." On top of that, the page forces the browser into fullscreen the instant it loads, without asking first, which two separate judges flagged as intrusive; and every invalid tap triggers a full-screen red flash, which at least one judge experienced as "constant red flashes no matter what I clicked on" while still learning which cards were legal to play. None of these are this review's own guesses — they're corroborated complaints from the game's own competition judges, and they line up with genuinely low placements across the board: 144th of the field for controls, 128th for gameplay, 146th for theme.

Final verdict

The core interaction — tap a card, watch it play — was independently verified to work, and this review leaves the build measurably better than it found it by fixing a real rendering bug. But a shelf built for phone visitors playing alone can't recommend a game that structurally requires more than one person to hold in their hands, on top of a forced fullscreen jump and a punishing flash effect that the game's own competition judges pushed back on. Not a fit for this shelf as shipped.