Nyanko Daidorobou

~ the last words ~

The cats broke into other people's castles, and other people's cats broke into yours. Ponos shipped it on 8 October 2019 as a real-time strategy game in the Battle Cats line, built by the same team, free with item billing. The servers stopped at ten in the morning on Monday 22 December 2025.

Six years and two months is a lot for a spin-off of anything. Ponos is a Kyoto company that writes and builds its own games in house and ships them abroad as well as at home, and the Battle Cats series it belongs to has been running since 2011. This one got a millionth download and an event to mark it. Then it got a notice in late November 2025 giving a date under four weeks out, and the public version of that notice gave no reason.

The Battle Cats is one of the handful of Japanese phone games with a real following outside Japan. That following belongs to the parent. The spin-off is off both stores now, and looking the name up returns the parent plus a different Ponos cat game and nothing else.

~ the record ~

~ how the stealing worked ~

You picked one of your five cats and pushed it through one of ten entry points, five down each side of a stranger's castle, then swiped it from room to room. Moving up or down made noise, and so did springing a trap. If a guard dog sat inside the noise radius on the minimap it came running, and a bitten cat went to jail for the rest of the raid. Three cats in jail ended the raid there, with your points taken off you.

Motivation was the second kind of pressure. It drained on its own and faster through traps, and at zero you lost points and left. The treasury was a sliding door you tapped open for a chest. Open the wrong one and a dog was waiting behind the paper, because some of the treasuries were fakes, and the fakes you had not opened converted into extra guards the moment an alarm went off. Taking a real chest set off that alarm and closed most of the ten doors you came in through.

Defending was a budget problem. Twelve traps on a cost of thirty-five, with a preview button that let you raid your own layout to see whether it held. Empty cans made noise and caltrops did damage, and the fixed furniture of the castle, the guards and the fake treasuries, could not be moved or removed. There was also an auto-placement button that scattered your traps at random, for anyone who would rather not plan out a castle.

~ six years and two months ~

The economy underneath it had one nice inversion. Equipment came in four rarity tiers and leveling it up cost experience, but the rarer a piece was, the less experience it needed, so the grind got shorter as the loot got better. The chests worked the other way around: a rarer chest paid more, and rarer contents paid less, with the top-tier traps pinned at one point flat. Each cat had clothes it preferred, and premium clothing blunted specific traps, though you had to own the plain version before you were allowed to wear the good one.

Leagues ran to eight and eight was the end of the game. What the servers held was the thing that made all of it work, which was everybody else's castle. A trap game with nobody left to trap is a diagram.

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