First Rat

To set up First Rat for two players, place the central board in the middle of the play area. Distribute all resource tokens—vinegar, baking soda, tin cans, and calculators—into separate piles around the board. Place the bottle cap scoring tiles, comic book upgrades, and rocket part tiles in their designated areas. Each player chooses a color and places two rat pawns at the start of the junkyard path, along with their scoring markers on the corresponding tracks. Finally, determine the starting player through a quick game, with the first player receiving starting cheese and the first-player marker.

The primary objective of First Rat is to lead your rat family to the ultimate cheese moon by successfully building and fueling a rocket ship. Players compete to gather various resources from the junkyard path, deliver them to the rocket construction bays, and guide their individual rats all the way to the launchpad. The game rewards strategic planning, resource management, and efficient movement along multiple overlapping tracks.

On your turn, you must move one or more of your available rats along the junkyard path. You can move a single rat up to five spaces, or move multiple rats up to three spaces each, provided all moved rats end their turn on the same color space. If you land on a space occupied by an opponent's rat, you must pay one cheese per rat present. After movement, you collect the resources shown on your landing spaces. You may then optionally visit shops to buy backpacks or energy drinks using cheese, and finally, you can build rocket parts or donate cheese to scoring tracks.

Scoring in First Rat happens during end-game calculation. Players score points based on their progress on the rocket construction tracks (cockpit, cargo bay, and thrusters), collected bottle cap multipliers, cheese donations, and leftover resources. Any remaining moldy cheese subtracts points. Bonus points are also awarded for each rat successfully launched into space via the launchpad.

The game triggers its end condition immediately when any player successfully moves all four of their rats into the spaceship launchpad, or when a player places their eighth scoring cube onto the main board. Once triggered, the current round is completed so all players take an equal number of turns, after which final scoring takes place to determine the winner.