Category: Games

Fish Cook
Cheapass Games/2012

In Fish Cook, you and your fellow Fish restauranteers are competing to create an elite menu for your restaurant, fulfilling orders, and making money. Depending on the number of players, the game will be played over the course of 3-5 “days”. Each day consists of a “morning” phase, where players purchase fish, ingredients or recipes for their restaurant, and an evening phase, where players fill orders from their menu, or try to steal recipes from their opponents. At the end of each day, the fish market and farmer’s market are re-stocked for the next day. At the end of the last day, the player with the most money wins.

This game has good strategic play. You must manage your money wisely, to maximize your purchasing power and get the most profit from your recipes. You start with $100 dollars, and must budget to get the best bang for your buck. The hard part is that there isn’t always a good market for the items you need to purchase. As fish and ingredients get scarcer, they get more expensive as well. Recipes that give you the most money, also require the most ingredients. You can win with a strategy of making a few expensive recipes or making a lot of cheaper recipes.

Cheapass Games has a long history of publishing games that supply only the parts required for specific game play, assuming that you could find common parts (play money, dice, etc.) in your own home from other games. They were published with lesser quality components, in order to keep the costs down, and make the games more accessible to everyone. Their first games were published with photocopied black and white cards and multi section photocopied boards, and were published at $5 or under. Fish cook costs $15, still quite a bargain, and comes with 2 — 2 section full color game boards, 36 full color custom “recipe” cards (same stock and finish as regular playing cards), and over 100 full color ingredient tokens, a first player token, and five day markers. The components are decent quality. I’ve seen a lot worse from more expensive games. You will need to 12+ dice and some way to keep track of money. Your Monopoly play money would work, but we keep track with pen and paper and it works just as well.

We found this game to be entertaining, well balanced, and fun.  Recommended.

Monsters & Maidens & Epic Dice Expansion
Clever Mojo Games, Game Salute, 2014

Do you like the game Zombie Dice, but wish it didn’t have Zombies? Well, now there is another option out there for you, Monsters & Maidens.

The basic set comes with 9 dice (3 Maiden dice, 3 Hero Dice, and 3 Monster Dice), 3 Epic Fail cards, a Maiden Card, 2 Hero Cards and a Monster Card. Each of the 3 sets of dice have Monsters, Heroes and Maidens on their faces, but each 3 dice is weighted towards their dice type (The Maiden Dice has 3 faces for Maidens and the rest are either monsters or heroes.) On your turn, you take a Hero card and the Monster card and set them in front of you. Then you roll all 9 dice. You set any maidens rolled onto your hero card, then match up the monsters and heroes. If you have more monsters than heroes, then you move maidens equal to the number of extra monsters to the monster card. If you cannot do this, your turn is over. If you have more heroes than monsters, you are good. Then you may choose to re-roll. If in future re-rolls, should you have more heroes than monsters, you may move maidens from the monster card back to the maiden card. Once you decide to stop rolling, or if you have met an end condition, then you count up your maidens and score them.  Then the next player goes. If you fail to get maidens on your first turn and can’t re-roll, you can pick up an Epic Fail card, and on your next turn, you can change the face of one dice after your first roll.

This isn’t really my type of game. It isn’t interactive. By that, I mean that it is several players, playing solo games trying to beat the score of the others. There is no way to affect dice rolls of other players. You have to trade off the monster and hero cards every turn. If one person rolls well, they can easily get a huge lead, and it’s almost impossible to recover, and there isn’t anything to do when it isn’t your turn except watch other people roll their dice.  The game has a lot of little fiddly rules, especially when you add in the expansion, and the wording on some of the expansion bits is vague. But it isn’t really, well, fun. I misght even go so far as to call it boring. Might be a good drinking/pub game. But honestly, I think Zombie Dice works better as far as gameplay. M&M has a little of the “press your luck” aspect, but it tends to come down to one or two rolls then you’re done.

So if you are looking for a lightweight game, mostly fluff, or you just like to roll dice, go ahead and pick this up. Otherwise, I’d give it a pass.

Loonacy
Looney Labs, 2014

Does everything seem kind of crazy around the holidays? I think so, which may be why I have a Looney theme going on here. Just received a copy of Loonacy from Looney Labs. (Thanks!) So we sat down to give it a whirl.

Loonacy is an insanely fast lightweight card game. The object is to get rid of your cards first by matching one of the two pictures from the cards in your hand to the cards on the top of the three discard piles. I think our first game played in 20 seconds. Some of the art may seem familiar if you have played any of the Fluxx games. Not really anything original to this type of game play, but still a quick, fun little game with some entertaining art.

So if you have stuffed yourself on a little too much turkey, and need something to keep you awake and alert, grab Loonacy and a couple of family members or friends, and gear up for a Looney fast game. This would also make a good stocking stuffer for kids you know.

Looney Bin
Numbskull Games, 2008

Looney Bin is a quirky, weird, easy and fun card/board game for 3-7 players. You are a doctor in the Looney Bin. You have a ward of 4 patients that you attempt to cure. The first person to clear their ward or cure five patients is the winner.

To start the game, you are dealt 4 patient cards. These sit face up in front of you, forming your ward. Each patient receives a face down tile that details the treatment that they need to be cured. These tiles are secret, no one knows what is on them. You are also dealt a hand of 5 action cards. The player with the highest numbered patient goes first. On your turn, you play any number of action cards, either on yourself or others, then make one attempt at finding a cure.

This is where the game is really cool. It has a great mechanic for curing. There are seven “Therapies” in the game: A padded cell, Electroshock, Frontal Lobotomy, Group Therapy (we ended up calling this “needing a hug”), A straightjacket, Medicine, and Hypnosis. You pick a therapy, and the person to your left looks at the tile. If you have guessed a correct therapy, you put the therapy chit on your card face up, and make another therapy attempt. You keep guessing, as long as you keep guessing correctly. If incorrect, you place the chit face down (the “no”) side, draw a card and your turn is over. There are only 3 therapies on each tile, so it takes a couple guesses to get the three you need to cure the patient. Event cards can help you by giving extra guesses, stopping other people from playing cards on you or other numerous effects.

We found this game quite entertaining. We enjoyed the mechanic and the event play. Overall, pretty well balanced. It runs quickly. We are pondering purchasing a larger pill holder and using it as a storage for the therapy chits. We had a lucky guesser at our table who one both games because he was able to continue guessing cures in longer runs, but we were able to slow him down. If you hate games that take some luck, this might not be the game for you. We were getting into the cards and having a really good time with it.

On the negative side. The production quality of this game isn’t the best.  The chits are a little flimsy, and the lamination on the cure tiles tends to make them stick together. The artwork is ok, but comes off as a bit amateurish overall. The good game play might be able to overcome this, but the price tag of $30 might cause some to balk because of the production quality. I could see these folks trying a kickstarter to push this game to the next level with better art and better quality pieces and packaging.

Overall fun game. Recommended if a good game is more important to you than a good looking game.