Publisher: Korea Board Games
Year: 2017
Personal History:
The folks at Sweet Lemon Games were kind enough to send me a box of some of their current game offerings. I immediately decided that this game would be the first I played and reviewed. The reasons are twofold. First, it's largest component is a plastic frying pan. It's wonderful.
Second, my daughter is a bit obsessed with toy food items right now. She has this awful cupcake board game that she loves to death and plays with us endlessly which I've yet to review here. I probably ought to. Maybe that's next. Anyway, my thought was that, if I could introduce her to a GOOD game that had little toy food components, maybe we could play that instead and I would be set free from the awful cupcake game. For a while at least.
Gameplay:
Yummy is one third dexterity game, one third memory game and one third gambling game. In the basic game the first "chef" player randomly selects eight of the pancake discs and places them face-up in the frying pan. All players are shown the pancakes in the pan.
She then flips the frying pan in an attempt to flip over at least three of the pancakes. If not enough pancakes have been flipped she continues to flip them. If a pancake falls out of the pan it is placed back face up. Once she has flipped at least three pancakes so they are face down, she may stop. If the chef manages to flip five or more pancakes face down she may take one as a prize.
Once the flipping is done the chef must "share" her flipped pancakes. She chooses one, looks at it's topping without letting the other players see it, and then chooses one other player to try and guess which pancake it is. The guesser must use her memory of what all eight pre-flipped pancakes were, plus some quick odds making and a little luck, to try an guess correctly. If the guesser is correct, then he gets the pancake. If the guesser is incorrect then the chef gets the pancake.
The chef may offer to share as many pancakes as a face-down in the pan, but she is only forced to share one. Each shared pancake makes the other face down pancakes theoretically easier to guess, and therefore less likely to win if you're the chef. When a chef runs out of face-down pancakes, or chooses to stop sharing, then all remaining pancakes are removed from the pan, the next player becomes chef, and the process is repeated. The first player to collect twelve pancakes is the winner.
But Wait, There's More!:
Also included with the copy of Yummy Yummy Pancake that I was sent was a copy of the Spiel '17 Promo Boards. Spiel is a gaming show in Essen, Germany that I'll never attend, and these were presumably offered there for attendees.
These boards add a different win condition to the game. Instead of simply obtaining twelve pancakes to win, a player must instead collect the exact pancakes necessary to creating the plates seen on her promo board. Each board features three plates. One plate features two or three of the same pancake (the boards are double sided for variable difficulty), another has a pair of different pancakes, and the third shows face-down pancakes. When a player collects one of her needed pancakes she places it over the picture of that pancake on one of her plates. When she receives a chocolate pancake it can be used like a wild card on any space. When she receives a pancake she does not need it is placed on the third, face-down plate. Once three face-down cakes are collected they can be traded in for any pancake left on the table.
So How Is It?:
Yummy Yummy Pancake is a cute combination of dexterity, memory and push-your-luck, tinged with just a little bit of take-that action for good measure. Nothing in this game is going to be all that exciting for a seasoned adult gamer I don't think, however for a young child it's a really nice mix of all those elements.
Players have to remember which pancakes they saw before the flip, and do a quick bit of odds making when they're picked on to try and win the pancake, which is actually some fairly sophisticated thinking for a young kid, and a good skill to be practicing. I fear though that in a play group with a bunch of merciless young children it will quickly become a case of everyone always picking the child with the worst ability to remember the pancakes that started in the pan to "share" their pancakes with. I almost feel like the game needs a rule in there preventing one opponent from always being the target in a game with more than two players.
That said, I love how the game plays. The flipping of the pancakes adds a little bit of a dexterity element which, while forgiving if you're bad at it, actually can affect the usefulness of your round as chef. It is much easier to win pancakes if you start with a large number of pancakes flipped in your pan, so mastering the flipping technique will help you score points. That said, if you're awful at it you still get to flip until you finally succeed and are not penalized for failure in that part of the game.
The component quality here is pretty high too. The frying pan is a nice, reasonably sturdy toy frying pan. I'm pretty happy about that as my daughter took it to play in her toy kitchen immediately following our first few tries at the game, and it has survived that test of its endurance so far. The pancakes are a soft plastic, but weighted enough that they can be flipped successfully. They feel sort of like the type of PVC plastic that Smurfs are made of, and as such they neither bounce nor clack when they hit the pan. I do wish they were a little bigger, but I understand that would have necessitated a larger everything else, and besides the added cost in making it the dexterity part would also be a little less accessible for young children. That said, they are cute and the graphics on the stickers are very clear and work great.
The Spiel '17 promo boards aren't a "must have" strictly speaking, but I feel like they will give the game a little more longevity for your children as they age, so trying to pick up a set is probably a good idea. It does add some planning and strategy to the game, and makes the choices a chef makes on his turn a little more important as you're trying to prevent opponents from getting the pancakes they need, while at the same time making sure you help yourself out.
Really, this is a unique and well made game for young people, and we enjoyed playing it.
Final Verdict:
High Quality components and a varied mix of gaming styles make this a game worth giving the kids. Add to it a fun theme and some take-that action, and it's one that, if they're anything like my daughter, they'll ask to play again and again. Yummy Yummy Pancake scores a "Good" 4/5.
