Who Should We Eat? Review

Your plane crashes, stranding you and a mismatched team of survivors on a mysterious desert island. What was meant to be a pleasant, relaxing beach holiday quickly turns into a desperate fight for survival. Work together with your team to scavenge food, maintain your sanity, and build a raft to escape. Fail to build the raft or go completely insane and you’ll be trapped here forever. Run out of food and, well… Who Should We Eat?

‘Who Should We Eat?’ Gameplay

Work together in this ‘semi-cooperative’ card game to gather resources, complete quests, and fend off the haunting souls of your lost companions. This 4-10 player game (which takes about 30 minutes) has players drawing cards to hunt for resources that affect one of three tracks: Food, Sanity, and Building. Each player has a character card and a personality card that determine the number of cards they can draw, a special ability, and a ‘Meat Value’. This tells everyone else just how filling you would be. Each card you draw has an effect, should you choose to play it. Usually the effect is raising one of the three tracks. Each card also has a ‘keep effect’, sometimes nothing, sometimes something useful just for you. Whilst you can only play one card and keep another, some cards are definitely better than others. The more you can draw, the more choice you’ll have.

Morning Phase

The morning phase has you gathering resources and deciding what is worth bringing back to camp. The leader of the previous day passes the Conch shell (first player token) on to the next survivor. Anyone you ate last night returns as a ghost, and the day begins. Your character card will give you a good indication of which track you should focus on. A comedian or psychiatrist will spend a lot of time cheering everyone else up and raising sanity, while the carpenter builds the boat, and chefs or butchers are the best at finding food. Keep an eye on your ‘Meat Value’ too, if yours is pretty high, you’ll want to make yourself as useful as possible to convince everyone you’re better alive than as tonight’s dinner.

In this phase, you will decide which cards you’ve drawn are worth playing and which you will discard. Deciding what to play is simple: try your best to stop the tracks from reaching 0. Keep cards, however, won’t usually be shown to anybody else. You’ll need to think about what’s best to keep. Do you have a great card to play next round? Maybe something sharp to defend yourself in a knife fight? See a special ability that lets you hide from votes? Keep it.

Afternoon Phase

Now you’re back at camp after a long day’s work, ready to share your spoils. Players reveal their play cards one at a time to see who brings home the honey and who wasted their day on some dodgy shellfish. The leader picks the day’s quest, giving the group a much-needed boost. usually at some small expense of the member unlucky enough to draw the short straw.

Night Phase

At night, the tracks drop down. The mental labour of spending another day in this small patch of nowhere costs you some sanity and the remaining survivors have their fill of food. If sanity hits zero, everyone left alive loses. Hit a negative number on the food track and it’s time to ask the question: Who Should We Eat?

The leader sets the rules for the trial, who will speak and when. In true desert island democracy, nobody can speak until the conch shell is banged on the table once. After this, all bets are off. Do anything you need to stay alive. Blame your sister for not eating that monkey, point the finger at the hero who pulled their back on the last quest, whatever it takes to steer those hungry eyes away from you. Be ready to use your hidden knife if the conversation isn’t going your way. Just be sure to do so before the conch shell hits the table again, or everything will go to a vote. On the count of three, everyone will point at who they think should take one for the team.

Did you get unlucky? Are you now island chow because you suggested eating grandma and lost the popularity contest? Don’t worry. You can rise in the morning as a ghost to exact your revenge and ensure nobody leaves the island alive!

Final Thoughts

The most divisive feature in Who Should We Eat? is the ghost mechanic. Whilst having players come back the next morning to sabotage the team is great at avoiding an elimination problem, it can easily just feel like changing sides. If you think you might be on the menu in the next few rounds, you may be tempted to sabotage the team, pushing the balance in the ghosts’ favour. Do you only have three players left alive and no progress on the boat? Then hope you lose the vote and rise in the morning to claim victory for the ghosts.

That’s not what Who Should We Eat? is designed for though; the theme is integral. Get immersed in the desert island survival scenario, play to escape and you’ll have a much better experience. Avoid voting for players because ‘Dad ate the last slice of pizza last week’ and work to imagine the story. Rather than seeing the helpful monkey card as adding a number to food or building, imagine what that means for the monkey. I don’t remember winning this game; I remember the surprise knife fights and the ‘squid that looks like Cthulu’.

The game is relatively simple and family friendly (despite the cannibalism). Whilst it isn’t my favourite style of artwork, it really works for the game and helps to remind you not to take winning too seriously. The straws are only punch-board tokens, so you very quickly get scuffed edges that tell you which is which. However, the thoughtful designers provided some cards to cover you in that eventuality. I love how satisfying it is to bang that wooden conch shell on the table. The lack of plastic in the box makes me feel a little more eco-friendly. This is, of course, at the cost of convenient storage. There’s plenty of space to fit sleeved cards if that’s your thing, but thanks to the lack of a card sized slot, you’ll likely find your cards sliding around everywhere between plays.

Who Should We Eat? is a fantastic party game, but if you expect any more than that you might be left feeling a little disappointed. This game plays really well in large groups and with lots of different people, but it can sometimes require that you switch off your tactical mind for a few minutes and focus on the player interaction.