Cat Trap — Play Free Online

Cat Trap is a small puzzle game that has very little in common with a runner, despite the shelf it sits on. A black cat stands on a board of round cells, and you have to box it in before it walks off the edge. There is no timer and no score ticker. Each round is a short back-and-forth between you and the cat, and it ends the moment one of you gets what they want.

The drawing is plain line art on a white background, so the game loads fast and reads clearly on a phone. It suits a few quiet minutes between longer sessions of something twitchier, which is a good counterweight if most of your time on Doodle Jump goes on reflex games.

How to play

The board is a grid of cells with the cat somewhere near the middle. On your turn you click or tap one empty cell to block it. Then the cat takes a step to a neighbouring free cell, and it always heads for the nearest way out. If it reaches the border of the board, you lose the round. If every neighbour of the cat is blocked so that it cannot move, you win.

You cannot move the cat or remove a block once it is placed, so every click is a commitment. A reset button in the corner starts a fresh board whenever you want a different layout. The page's own control note mentions arrow keys and WASD, but the game itself is built around the pointer: the cells respond to clicks and touches, and the board is the only thing you interact with.

Tips

• Think about the cat's shortest route to the edge, not where it stands now. Block the cell that cuts off its best exit, then deal with the second best.
• Build a wall in an arc rather than scattering blocks. A connected ring at a distance is more reliable than a pile around the cat's feet, because the cat will simply step around loose blocks.
• Spend early moves on the side with the most open space. The cat runs toward the weakest side, so leaving one side thin is how most rounds are lost.
• If a board goes wrong in the first few moves, reset instead of struggling on. Rounds are short, so a restart costs you almost nothing.

Similar games on Doodle Jump

If you want something with more direct control, Helix Jump has you guiding a bouncing ball down a rotating tower, and Bird Jumper is a one-button flapper built on timing. For a puzzle with real partners rather than a cat opponent, Fireboy and Watergirl asks two characters to cooperate through a temple, while Cat Trap is a solo game of planning ahead one move at a time.

It runs in the browser with nothing to install, works with a mouse or a finger, and is a fair pick for anyone who likes small logic puzzles that you can finish in a couple of minutes.