Food Fight from Cryptozoic is the first game on our list that was entirely new to us -- a friend gave it to Katherine for her birthday, and very thoughtfully chose a game that started with a letter we hadn't got to yet. The only other games we've played from Cryptozoic are the DC Comics Deck Building Game (weirdly, Katherine liked it more than I did, even though I'm the superhero fan), and their Locke & Key card game, which I found to be overly simple and completely lacking in any thematic connection to the excellent comic book series it's based on.
Nevertheless, we tried to approach Food Fight with an open mind. It's clearly not supposed to be a serious game; it involves each player marshaling their units of military food items such as Private Pizza and Tech Sergeant Toast to strategically attack either breakfast, lunch or dinner. Troops are stronger or weaker depending on which meal they're fighting for, and can be condiments such as Medic Mustard. In a two-player game, players decide secretly which of two possible meals they're going to go after. If they both choose the same one, they fight against each other, and if they attack different meals, they must each face the dreaded Dog, a side deck of cards that provides random strength numbers for the player to pit their troops against.
It really isn't a bad game, it's just a very simple one. The theme is a bit silly, which wouldn't be a bad thing if the game had some interesting game play or strategy to it, but we didn't find that to be so. The rule book suggests a card drafting mechanic for the start of each round, where players chose one card from their hand to keep and pass the rest around, but with two players this just amounts to passing cards back and forth across the table, so we decided to skip it and play with what we were dealt. It could be that Food Fight is a lot more fun with more than two players (I suspect that it is) but since the box claims it can be played by 2-6, I don't think it's unfair to assess it based on our two-player games.
Rating: 2 (out of 5) Although we didn't dislike the game, Food Fight failed to engage our enthusiasm.
- Food Fight official website
- Food Fight on BoardGameGeek.com
Date played: January 25, 2014