Who says you can't play with your food? In this week's entry, I'd like to show you a few games that encourage you to have your cake, play around with it, toss it in the air, slap it up and down, and eat it too (although you may not be able to get over the taste of paper!) Here we go with Food Games!
I'm not sure why people are obsessed with sushi (I happen to think it's delightfully average), but for those of you having sushi cravings, I have the trick! Wasabi is a 2008 game released by Z-Man Games. I had the pleasure of trying this game a few years ago with the NYC Boardgames and Cardgames Group. The following images are courtesy of boardgamegeek.com.
In Wasabi!, you are a sushi chef attempting to complete recipes by gaining ingredients and placing them on the board. You'll start out with some basic ingredients and can gain special ingredients later on. Each turn players place an ingredient on the board, and the objective is to fulfill recipe strips (varying in length from 2 ingredients to 5 ingredients) to gain points at the end of the game.
Let's take Crunchy Tuna. I need a Rice, Tuna and Tempura tile to fulfill this recipe. If I am able to lay these three tiles in succession across the board, I'll put a 3-point challenge token on it (since there are three ingredients in the recipe). However, if I play the recipe in the exact order on my recipe strip, I'll have played the recipe "with style" and get a green wasabi cube (worth an extra point at the end) in addition to the three points. Larger recipes are harder to finish, but are worth more points (and wasabi cubes if finished with style), but small recipes can also end the game quicker!
As you can see there's a lot of traffic on the board! It will quickly get much harder to finish recipes, but you can piggyback on other people's unfinished recipes! The game ends once the board is completely filled, or someone uses all 10 of their challenge tokens. There are also special cards like WASABI! which help spice up the game and keep players on their toes.
You can find Wasabi at a bunch of retailers such as Amazon. Did I mention the game includes little Wasabi dishes too?
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But let's say you've already eaten dinner. Maybe you'd like some dessert. Say...a piece of cake?
I first heard about this game during a special segment on CBS on board games. What? Games are newsworthy? That's right. (See 3:30 for Piece of Cake)
The game's as easy as cutting a slice of cake (ignore the fact that the German designers decided to make their cake slices look like pie slices) and deciding whether to eat it or save it. When you eat a slice of cake, you get points based on how many whipped cream dollops that slice had on it.
However, if you have the majority of uneaten slices of one type of cake at game end, you get the number of points listed on that slice! The game's easy to pick up - just please try and resist the temptation to eat the cake slices! You can play this with 2-5 players, and buy it here on Amazon.
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But let's say you're tired of being served upon - you want to get into the kitchen and try and feed hundreds of hungry patrons. Perhaps your lifelong dream is to be a...Wok Star!
Wok Star is a cooperative game for 1-4 players where you run the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, trying to complete orders in a limited timeframe to make lots of money and get good publicity in the community. My regards to Tim Fowers, who created the diagrams I'm about to reproduce, which makes it a LOT easier to explain!
Everyone picks a character and is responsible for a station, where you can prep ingredients and serve orders. Each turn, a player can roll dice to prep ingredients. This must be done quickly, as there's a sand timer that will limit the amount of time to finish orders. Each finished recipe is worth money at the end of the round.
A preparation card looks like this. Everyone gets three dice, which can be shared around the table. Players roll their three dice and try to make ingredients based on what they rolled. In this example, I can make two Bok Choy if I rolled a six, or another player rolled a six and wanted to give their die to me. I could also use any number die roll to take one Bok Choy, but this would be an inferior option.
Everyone also has a set of recipe cards that they will need to communicate to the rest of the team. Egg Drop Soup requires a Chicken Broth and Egg, so you'll need to talk to your teammate who makes these ingredients in order to fulfill them.
When a customer comes in your restaurant asking for Egg Drop Soup, he'll give you two dollars if you complete his order, which you can use on upgrades and more recipes! However, if you don't feed him, you not only lose out on money, but also get bad publicity! If you get too much bad publicity, you'll lose the game. You'll also lose the game if you don't make enough money by the end of the game, which is why it's important to gain better recipes which are worth more money at game's end!
The game involves a lot of yelling and screaming, just like the kitchen of your friendly local Chinese restaurant! If you've ever waited a really long time at a restaurant for your order, this game will teach you to empathize with the chefs behind the scenes. Plus I don't know about you, but I really feel like some Wonton Soup. I better go grab some before I pass out and can't write these entries anymore.
I'm sad to report that this game has yet to be released! I tried a prototype of the game a few years ago with the publisher, but an official version is still in the works, hopefully for 2013.
Anyway, these are some ideas to introduce food themes into your game collection. Now doesn't that sound like more of a fulfilling meal than Candy Land?
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