Our team sat down for our meeting. Ideas flew – one person wanted “violence” in the game. Another advocated card games for ease of prototyping. We eventually settled onto the genres of deck-building (think Dominion) and card-battlers (like Slay the Spire, or Magic the Gathering for an analog version) for a preliminary idea. To our surprise we couldn’t find many games fitting this genre in the WGL, but we picked out a card-game version of Street Fighter (licensed on the old video game property) and Sushi Go Party!
Sushi Go Party! is fairly far-off from what we were looking for, but it was still worth a play. The goal of the game is to win the most points over three rounds of play, and each card is worth points in a different way. You choose from several presets of different cards to put in the deck, shuffle them all together, and deal out 6-9 cards to each player depending on how many people are playing. Actual gameplay is pretty simple – each turn, you pick one card from your hand, and everyone plays a card face up in front of them at the same time. Then you pass your hand to your left and repeat until the hands have been exhausted. Oh, and each card has a cute little piece of sushi on it, so don’t play hungry.
A loose overview of some of the cards: every game is played with some constant-value nigiri cards. Appetizers and rolls usually are worth points depending on how many you can collect. One eel appetizer was worth -3 points if you had one, but 7 if you had two or more. With our preliminary genres in mind, we went for the aggressive, interactive preset with lots of competition scoring. Whoever had the most Sushi Rolls at the end of the round won 4 points, and whoever had the least lost 4 points. We had Miso Soup appetizers, which were worth 3 points only if nobody else played another Miso Soup simultaneously. Puddings were the one card which accumulated between rounds and were only worth points at the very end. And the special Spoon cards let you steal a card of your choice out of someone else’s hand, useful for last-minute plays.
We definitely dove into the deep end for a first run at Sushi Go Party!. Plenty of the cards had complex interaction mechanics, people often didn’t understand what was going on, and we were actively misusing the special Spoon cards. We could see the way we were supposed to play the game: loosely memorize the contents of each hand, keep an eye on what everyone else is playing, and make actions to secure your own points before it’s too late as well as screw everyone else over. The rulebook was cleanly laid out, with two pages dedicated to the simple setup and gameplay, with the rest of the pages dedicated to the complexity of the card descriptions. While the high variety of cards in Sushi Go! allows for lots of replayability and prevents any one strategy from getting too strong, the game does take a while to learn, and in every session I’ve played we’ve messed up at least one fine-print point. Also, tallying up your points at the end of each round is a bit of a chore. That all said, Sushi Go! is a great fast-paced party game with fairly simple gameplay rules, where a lot of the complexity comes from difficult cards that can be excluded for beginning players. I think these are precepts we should carry into our own game development – keep it easy to learn, and possibly make some of the complexity optional for use after a beginner’s round.
