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Awards

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You Might Like

  • Easy Rules
  • Gorgeous artwork
  • Light but crunchy
  • Unlimited players

Might Not Like

  • No real direct player interaction
  • Some may be disappointed if they are looking for novelty
Find out more about our blog & how to become a member of the blogging team by clicking here

Delicious Board Game Review

delicious

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!

Greedy Guts

As well as playing with an unlimited number of carrot crunching competitors, the solo opponent aka the Pesky Crow is back! And, just like in Floriferous, it messes with what you can select each turn. And I don’t know how it does it, but it ALWAYS knows what you want. And takes it away. And makes you say rude words. Which feels totally justified as you will come to discover!

Final Thoughts

I love Floriferous, Sunset over Water, and The Whatnot Cabinet. So I was expecting to like Delicious. And I really do. It’s like a light but tasty dish that includes a little of a lot of the things I like in fast playing, puzzly, solo-able games.

In regular multiplayer mode it’s multiplayer solitaire style with added bonuses. (There is a mini- expansion that offers more in the way of meddling, but that is a KS exclusive only). And in solo mode, it feels more interactive in that the Pesky Crow thwarts all my best laid plans.

It has limited action options of games like Trek 12, and it has the puzzly meta, game-within-game style placement choices of a whole host of other fun roll and writes and flip and fills. It doesn’t do anything new, per se, but it tosses them together in a crunchy salad of scoring possibilities. And I really like that. In fact, just like the other Pencil First games, I like it best when it is just me! 20 minutes of delicious decision dilemmas that I can squeeze into a lunchbreak or after work moment of downtime. Delicious is a peaceful puzzly game that makes me want to come back for seconds…..and thirds!

That concludes our thoughts on Delicious. Do you agree? Let us know your thoughts and tag us on social media @zatugames. To buy Delicious today click here!

Zatu Score

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You might like

  • Easy Rules
  • Gorgeous artwork
  • Light but crunchy
  • Unlimited players

Might not like

  • No real direct player interaction
  • Some may be disappointed if they are looking for novelty

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