Calling all rat lovers

If you, like me, are a fan of the humble city rat, then the relationship between our fair city and New York is an instructive one. Like all things New York, the allure of America’s biggest city seems to make everything, including its relationship to the quintessential urban rodent, more grandiose. Whether it’s the high-profile search for a well-paid “rat czar” to handle the city’s “real enemy,” the countless videos of rats dragging around slices of pizza, or even the fact that “Rats in New York City” is its own Wikipedia page, you could easily convince yourself that the Big Apple is the singular American locale for ratty obsessions. 

But Chicago is no slouch when it comes to a certain reverence for the oft-despised creature. The transformation of Chicago’s iconic Don’t Feed the Rats poster by artist Derek Erdman into a loving encouragement to “Put ALL garbage on the ground” is only the most obvious example. WBEZ’s Curious City also did an investigation into the proliferation of Chicago’s rat population. While New York gets all the attention, Chicago has quietly held down the title of America’s rattiest city for eight straight years. If we’re the city that works, as Nelson Algren once said, it seems that the rats also got the message.

It’s no wonder then, that the goal of Target: Rats, a new board game from the Chicago-focused retailer Transit Tees, is to grow the city’s rat population, rather than destroy it. Following on the success of the company’s Uno-inspired card game Loop, later turned into a board game, Target: Rats pits up to four rat families against one another, and even more distressingly, an exterminator figure who haunts the city streets. The goal is simple: to spread one’s rat empire above and below ground as far and wide as possible, by building nests, spawning new rats, and fighting to become “Da Big Cheese,” or the ruler of the underground hub that sits at the center of the game board.

Target: Rats The Board Game transittees.com

Like many board games, Target: Rats requires a bit of a learning curve to settle in, although once you’ve established the basic rhythms, gameplay is dynamic and rewarding. Turns are structured by a combination of movement and activity, with several possible outcomes after moving four spaces on the board: feed (if rats are at a food source), breed (if two rats are fed, they can give birth to two others), nest (creating a potential new spawning point), fight (if you happen upon another player’s rats), or scavenge, which involves taking a card from one of two decks. Players move from the surface to the underground via sewers, and placeable dumpsters can create a steady food source that allows more rats to enter gameplay.

The game balances elements of strategic thinking, luck, and interpersonal interactions but not always successfully. For one, there’s an imbalance in the two card decks: surface-level cards are skewed nearly three-to-one in favor of spawning more rats, compared to a more even split underground, which can create inadvertent imbalances in player outcomes depending on where players settle. But the biggest impediment to forward progress is the lack of dedicated food sources that remain on the game board, making it hard to even begin expanding one’s rat population. Even if you’ve played the game before and have a strategy in mind, it can take a frustratingly long time to build momentum, which in my experience warded off some first-time players from wanting to dig deeper.

Courtesy Transit Tees

Like so many board games, house rules can make up for certain limitations in the board game’s base settings. For one, all future playthroughs in my household will include several dedicated, nondisappearing food sources, available to all rats at all times. Rebalancing the game in this way speeds up gameplay and removes some of the frustration for first-time players, better allowing players to focus on the other, more fun elements of the game that are more challenging when resources are scarcer.

Those elements are combat between rat families, and the ever-present threat of the Exterminator, a crucial X factor that can make or break a game. The player who possesses Da Big Cheese, first gained by throwing a one in the center of the board, also gains a critical advantage that makes its possession vital throughout the game. Balancing the strategic question of when and with how many rats to fight your opponents for territory, combined with the luck of a dice throw, ensures that each confrontation around the game board becomes a dynamic showdown.

The Exterminator is the other factor that can cut a player’s momentum in their tracks and prevent someone from winning just as it seems the game is in hand. The Exterminator kills rats, destroys food sources and nests, and otherwise blocks movement around the board. 

It provides a challenging impediment to forward progress, while also allowing those falling behind to catch up by targeting their opponent’s favorite dedicated nesting spot/food source combination for extermination. Even when a player is on the brink of victory, holding possession of Da Big Cheese and with three nests around the board even after every other player has gone, a lucky throw can unexpectedly stretch the game further.

Still, at the end of the day, I found myself wondering: would it be possible to play against the Exterminator? In a game of expanding rat populations, could players work together not in a battle of survival of the fittest, but instead aim to overrun the entire map, until the Exterminator can no longer prevent the rats from taking over the entire city itself?

I have yet to give this rewrite a chance, but my vision is simple: players collaborate to build communal nests, expand food supplies, and otherwise attack the Exterminator at all turns. There’d be a limit on the number of player turns available before the game ended, and the goal would be to get every single nest and rat on the board before time ran out. The game board itself seems capacious enough to carry out this approach and honors our city’s real-life rats, who have done so well to grow their ranks with seemingly nothing to stop them.

In his book Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants,  Robert Sullivan writes, “I think of rats as our mirror species, reversed but similar, thriving or suffering in the very cities where we do the same.” Target: Rats invites us to suspend our usual judgments, embrace our furry rodent counterparts, and spread out a bit, content to proliferate as widely as our own rats have managed. Our rats live in abundance, making us the country’s rattiest city; perhaps it’s time we start to do the same. 

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