My cats (Mozzarella String Cheese, Bacon Bits, and Tater Tot – a true cats-erole) are climbers, but since my move last year, they haven’t had anything but the furniture to scale. I was tired of using my stepladder to get them down, so I decided to try the Purrini Playmate. This modular pet toy can be used to build play structures for your cat. Since it’s modular, there’s really no limit to the types of things you can build. It made a great birthday present for Tater Tot, since he turned one last week and officially graduated from kittenhood.
Unboxing
The packaging is perfectly designed to fit the product. It’s tall and square, and there are sturdy handles built into the sides of the box. It makes it very easy to move around, and means that it’s a great storage box if I ever want to break the Purrini Playmate down and put it away.
When I lifted the lid off, I was immediately greeted by the instructions. They’re clear and easy to understand, with picture diagrams instead of words. (Think IKEA directions, but ones that make way more sense.) They also stress having fun and being creative with what you build;the directions are more like guidelines if you need a place to start. It felt a little bit like grown-up Legos, except less dangerous to the unslippered foot.
The pieces themselves are in reusable carrying bags inside the crate. It makes the pieces a lot easier to get in and out of the box itself, and the bags are nicely made, which means that they can be saved and used for storing the Purrini Playmate in the box. I got the Paradise Set, which has 96 pieces, so having a good way to store it will definitely come in handy.
Set up and playtime
I decided to start simple: a cube with a door and a roof. This would be a one-cat condo, but I wanted to familiarize myself with how the pieces worked before attempting anything more complex.
As it turns out, there was no reason to worry. The pieces attach to each other by Velcro, and it’s easy to tell the fuzzy side from the sticky side at a glance. The hardest part was keeping the cats out of it while I was trying to build it.
Once I got the easy build out of the way, I wanted to try something more complex. I went for a small curved tunnel, thinking that they’d enjoy chasing each other through it.
A lot of the promotional photos show taller builds, so I wanted to see how one of those would go. Cue the three-cube combo!
At this point, I was pretty happy with it… but my word is far from final on this. The true test would be whether or not the cats liked it, because as any cat owner can tell you, your feline friend is almost always more likely to jump in the shipping crate than to use the new toy you got them.
The verdict
The verdict was swift: my cats love the Purrini Playmate. They hid in it. They chased each other through it. They slept in it. They brought other toys inside to play with in there. And, to my complete delight, they love scratching at it, which means that my furniture gets a break!
I was also pleased to find, after a few days, how well the material holds up. You’d be shocked at how often something made specifically for cats is in shreds and tatters in under a week. The Purrini Playmate, though, is made from sturdier stuff. No matter how much my cats scratched at the pieces, the material remained intact.
I’ll admit that I was also a little afraid at the start that my cats would manage to wrestle straight through the walls, pushing through Velcro and falling out the side of the building. This was a completely baseless fear on my part. The walls stayed intact through all the wrestling matches, and a one-story cube’s roof supported them just fine as well.
The only thing that I found myself wishing for was a way to make multi-level builds. While you can make exterior walls as tall as you’d like, there’s no way to put floors in other than at ground level. All of the directions for builds with taller sections in them were completely hollow on the inside, so though they’re fun to look at (and to build!), they’re pretty much just aesthetically pleasing.
All told, I’m incredibly happy with the Purrini Playmate. It’s packaged well, has clear instructions, and is very easy to put together. The fact that you can build it into endless configurations means that it’s great for any size space. What’s more, it’s a cat product that cats actually love – and that they can’t easily destroy. Six paws up from my household!
To learn more, check out the campaign for Purrini Playmate, now in InDemand.
