Delicious Board Game Review

Do you eat your recommended 5 per day? We don’t always hit the arbitrary target (except little one who is drilled on their school dinner choices and gets handed a cucumber to crunch whenever the 24 hour stats look iffy!). However, we have started play our quota of veggies in Delicious! And that’s got to be good, right?

So what is Delicious? And it is a crunchy carrot or a rotten tomato?

Feast For The Eyes

I know it seems strange to start a review with components, but this little game has beauty at its core. It even calls itself “an artful game”. So it would be remiss of me to keep the glory until the end.

If you have played Herbaceous, Floriferous, The Whatnot Cabinet, or Sunset over Water, you’ll know Pencil First Games produce some gorgeous titles. And just like the herby, flowery and curio offerings of before, this one is a box full of mouth-watering watercolours. Every card is a wonderful illustration of delicious delights that look god enough to eat…nom…….

Ahem, right, back to regular review broadcasting!

Flipping Fields

Delicious is a flip and fill. This just means that it’s a roll and write style pen and paper game that uses a deck of cards instead of dice. So, in addition to the deck of yummy treats, is a score sheet, some tokens, pencils, and some tokens.

The deck is divided into two; top and bottom gardens to match the two halves of the scoring sheet. Every round, a card is flipped face up on both decks and a random token is placed on each one. The tokens are either fruits or vegetables, or one of an assortment of one-time use tools.

In simultaneous fashion, everyone then chooses what they do with the cards and tokens on show. It’s then time to call upon your inner artist, as you will be drawing the relevant fruit or veg onto a box in an appropriate planter in your garden.

Now, unlike games where you select the pair you want to use, Delicious has a few more options on the menu. You can of course use the card and token in the indicated garden. But you can also use both cards in their respective gardens. Or you can reverse one and use top in bottom and vice versa. Or you can even use both pairs wherever you want.

Now, if that sounds like a generous granny sized helping of delicious options, put your spoon down for a moment. The kicker here is that you only have 12 rounds in the game. And each of those 4 actions can only be used a certain number of times during the entire thing. And, as you would expect, the super-duper double helping of cards, can only be used twice compared to three or four times for the other choices. And that means there’s a crunchy layer under the soft soil in this game!

The tokens act as placement indicators. So even after you have decided which action to take, there’s thinking to be done. Plus the vegetable planters themselves have their own rules (nobody puts baby beetroot in the corner! Haha). Fruits score based on patterns – complete rows and columns of matching/mixed delights, which adds a third option to consider.

Plus, if you’re hot on your horticulture, there are bonuses to be had. And as these only apply first past the planter style, there’s also a mini race going on in this garden!