Should I get a playmate for my super playful cat?

My 2-year-old male cat Roger is very very active and seeks to play as long as he's awake. My husband and I give him as much time as we could to play with him, and he has a lot of toys (traditional and automatic) and a big cat tree, but it does not seem to be enough for him. We even consider walking him on leash but he hates the harness and now the weather does not permit that anymore. We also have a 1.5-year-old female cat Iris. When we first got them 4 months ago, she was also very active and always chased Roger to the point of annoying him. But she's getting more and more laid-back (while Roger is more and more active. Don't know why!) and is only in the play mood 2-3 times per day, during which they chase around the apartment and have fun. But other than these times, Roger gets easily bored and always comes to us for play or growls around the apartment in boredom. We hate to see him get bored and worried that this would be bad for his mental and physical health. We're now considering adopting a playful younger cat (between 5 months - 1.5 years old) to be his playmate.

We love cats and very welcome a new family member. But the question is, whether this would cause more problems than solving the current one. We don't know whether adopting a new cat would be the best solution, since it's hard to anticipate the relations among the three, the personality of the new cat, etc. Introducing a new cat maybe painful in some cases. We know that cats with the same sex tend to be in more conflict, especially if both sides have dominant personality. Iris was very dominant in the beginning but starts to mellow out, but still can be bossy sometimes, while Roger grows more and more dominant (he would give up his food and toys to Iris before but not now). So we are not sure whether we should get a male or female and are worried that either one could piss off at least one of them. Besides, kittens/young cats are all playful but they may change into a mellow cat when they mature like Iris does. And if Roger stays that playful, we may face the same problem again in a few months. Or maybe we should wait a bit long before we get a new cat? If so, can I have some suggestions on how to keep Roger less bored now? We love him and want to give him the best.

It sounds like Roger and iris get along well, which is great (and seems to be giving your boy what he needs, to an extent at least).  Given that you already have 2 cats in an apartment, my suspicion is that you have a high chance of some strife if you add a third cat (especially a highly active one), since a major source of feline conflict is competition for resources (food, litter, and human interaction.)  If you want a third cat for yourselves, you can probably make it work with effort, but I think that, odds are high that a third cat will make things harder not easier,and I would suggest a female (because female cats have smaller territorial needs than males, so she'd need less and take less space than another male)

I assume that Roger is neutered, because, if not, that will settle him down a lot.  

A few things that come to mind are:

-more spaces for him to play and climb.    One cat tree is good, but two (or one plus a window shelf or two) gives even more options.  An alternative is to build him a fort out of boxes (which you may already have, with the holiday season)

-feeding part of his food in a treat ball or food tower should let him feel like he's hunting a bit for his food, which may satisfy some of his desire to play

-a good vigorous play session or two with a wand toy such as "da bird"  (i actually prefer the cheap Chinese (fishing pole type) wands to the official one, although the name brand replacement birds do last longer)

-teaching him to play fetch, and maybe getting an automatic fetch toy ( they make these launchers that toss little soft balls for fetch and re-throw them once the cat drops the ball back in it's hopper)

a few automatic and semi automatic toys that my high play kitten seems to like are as follows:

-bergan Turbo Scratcher

-hexbug

-fling-ama-string

-SmartyKat Feather Whirl

-plastic practice golf balls

Also, if you can mention some toys and things that Roger likes (and ones that he doesn't), that you have already tried, I (and others) can probably give you better suggestions.

Thanks for the suggestions! Both of them were fixed just before we adopted them (so about 4-5 month ago), but their activity levels seem to go into different directions, with Roger becoming more and more active.

We have a bunch of toys. Our apartment is not huge, so we only have place for one cat tree (just besides the window so they can do bird watching while sitting on the tree), and the window is not suit for the window shelf. But we allow them to climb our shelves, tables, etc and we already built them a "box castle" with 8 connected boxes and they climb in it from time to time. We do feed them using food balls. Other toys include all the automatic/semi-automatic toys you mentioned plus SmartyKat Electronic Concealed Motion Cat Toy, not to mention all the wand toys, catnip toys, stuffed toys, laser, balls, feather toys, tunnels, you name it. He is a true hunter and likes the things that move and allow him to ambush and then jump onto it, such as hexbug, concealed motion toy, Turbo, laser, and he LOVES  fishing rod types of toys, which we have three.

We have much more than 2 play sessions with him every day. We're out for work 5-7 hours per day. When we're home, we will play with him basically every time he comes to us and we need a stretch from sitting in front of the computer for too long. It probably encourages him to come to us more often... Usually we play with him with fishing rod toys/laser ( (seriously, every time he plays with them he could jump 5 feet in the air. He does not care how he could land at all!)) or fetching -  except that he has not learned to fetch the toys yet, only run to the toys and wait for us to throw him a treat Sometimes he will run along with us, so we could spend 10min running around the apartment with him. If we don't feel like standing up, we would give him the automatic toys and supervise him playing it. He also loves to wrestling and chasing with Iris, which he did not enjoy that much when they first came here. Basically he likes to do things that involve big movement. We suspect he was a outdoor/indoor cat before we adopted him and requires much more exercise than a pure indoor cat. That can explain his energy level and the fact that he is still a bit chubby even with so much exercise. Since we can't let him outside except for walking him on leash in warmer weather, we thought finding him a playmate is a good idea. But we're not sure now...

It sounds like you've put a lot of effort into your high energy cat, and done a lot of great work.  Some cats just have a higher prey/play drive,and roger sounds like one of them.  Hopefully he'll settle down a bit in a few months.   The only thing i can think of for him that I haven't suggested already, is maybe trying "cat tv" like the "cat dreams" dvd.

Yeah I just read an article on how to beat boredom for cats and saw this advice too! I didn't know there's such a thing for cats before. Would definitely try out (although I'm not sure whether he'll like it. We'll see!). Thanks!