The answer is My First Meal, it takes thirty seconds to set up, and you can stop reading. The rest of this is for the part that actually matters: why that menu and not another one, what is deliberately missing from it, and what to play on your second and third evenings so the game … Read more
Most of the five minutes you spend teaching Sushi Go Party! are spent on setup, not on rules. The rules are four sentences. Below is the whole teach, in order, plus the three things to deliberately not mention on a first game. Before anyone sits down, two minutes Do this while people are getting drinks. … Read more
Sushi Go Party! is not a hard game to score. It is a game where the scoring happens at three different moments, and almost all the confusion comes from mixing them up. Get those three moments straight and the rest is arithmetic you can do out loud. The three moments When What scores then What … Read more
The rules of Sushi Go Party! take two minutes to explain. The menu takes longer, and it is the only part of the box that stops people playing. You open it, find 22 menu tiles and a board full of empty slots, and realise the game is asking you a question before it will let … Read more
Two boxes, almost the same name, and the shop puts them next to each other. One is a small tin. The other is a big box with a board in it. They are the same game underneath. What you are choosing between is a fixed set of dishes and a box that lets you change … Read more
Short answer: yes. There is one part of the box that is not beginner friendly, and it is not the part people expect. This article covers what you actually do on a turn, why it works on a table of people who have never played anything, the one setup decision that trips new owners up, … Read more
Nobody is actually a non-gamer. There are people who had one bad evening with a long game and a rulebook, and people who were never handed anything good. So the question is not which games are simple enough for them. It is which games survive a room where half the people did not choose to … Read more
What kills a board game night is almost never the game being too hard. It is the twelve minutes where one person reads the rulebook out loud and everybody else reaches for their phone. So this list is ordered by how little you have to say before you can start playing. For each game you … Read more
Most board game lists are written for a full table. Six people, a Saturday night, snacks. That is not how most games actually get played. For a lot of us the real situation is two people, a kitchen table, and an hour before bed. A game that needs four players is a game that stays … Read more
I played Risk a long time ago, more than twenty years back, when I was an Erasmus exchange student in Norway. What always drew me to it was the what-if. What would the world look like if one power ended up controlling all of it? Risk lets you play out that scenario in a harmless … Read more
