Foodies Board Game Review:

In the Foodies board game, you are building an international food court. You attract customers by placing various food stalls throughout your food court. If you can get enough money, you can buy more expensive stalls, allowing you to gain popularity. The player with the most popularity wins.

How to Play

to play Foodies board game you are collecting popularity by buying food stalls and placing them strategically, earning popularity whenever the stall is visited. The player with the most popularity points at the end of the game wins.

At the start of your turn, you will roll a 10-sided die. Then announce the number rolled. Everyone will collect the resources shown on one of their stall locations labeled 1 to 9 according to the number rolled. If a 10 is rolled, that player may pick a number from 1 to 9. Everyone collects resources from the chosen number. At the start of Foodies, you will be collecting small amounts of money, but as your food court grows, you will unlock more valuable stalls letting you collect more money and popularity. You can collect money by taking it from the supply, while when you gain popularity, you move your marker up the popularity track.

You start the game with Flyers. These expendable resources allow you to change the number rolled to any number next to it. For example, if a 5 is rolled, you may change it to a 2, 4, 6, or 8. this change only applies to your board, so all other players will still collect from the rolled stall while you collect from the new stall.

After collecting resources, you can spend any money you earned in the market. You may buy one of the 5 food stall options. Each card has unique benefits to each cuisine alongside the standard money, popularity, and half stars. Money can be used to buy stalls. Popularity is used for end-game scoring. Finally, half stars can be placed next to the other half stars to give extra popularity whenever they are rolled.

Once you have selected which food stall to buy, you must pay the amount of money equal to its position in the market. Then move all the stalls on its left 1 space to the right, reducing their price in future rounds. Then place a new stall from the deck in the left-most position in the market. Place the stall you purchased in any of the 9 locations on your board. Once the corresponding number is rolled, you gain the benefit listed on the card instead of earning your standard reward.

At the end of your turn, you may hire chefs. They give one-time benefits to popularity when you fulfill their requirements. The first chef can only be used once a turn. They allow you to exchange 4 coins for 1 popularity. The other 2 chefs can only be hired once, giving you 3 popularity whenever you complete their objective. These chefs are unique and will have different requirements for each game.

Once one player reaches 20 popularity (30 for 4 or more players), the game continues until everyone has an equal amount of turns. The player with the most popularity wins.

Pros

The Foodies board game has high replayability because it includes 10 cuisines. 5 of which are used in each game. Foodies also comes with 5 chefs, of which 2 are randomly selected. This allows each game to have a different strategy as different countries work together in unique ways.

This game has a way of rewarding everyone at every turn, making every roll rewarding without making it feel unearned. When you get a few coins here or there, even if you didn’t hit your best number, you can use a flyer to move it to a more favorable court.

Cons

To set up the game, you need to select 5 cuisines randomly. Once you pick them, you must shuffle them all into one deck. This is very time-consuming, especially considering the game is only 20-30 minutes. It can be very annoying to shuffle cards for 5 minutes before each game. The square cards with punched holes don’t make for optimal shuffling. And when you get halfway through a game and realize you haven’t even seen the 5th cuisine due to rushed shuffling.

All the game components are nicely organized in the game’s insert. While this is usually a good thing, the insert is only designed to hold the components when the box is horizontal. If you place the box vertically for storage, you will find your pieces spread throughout the box.

Accessibility

Color Blind: There is no disadvantage to reading the cards, but you will struggle to immediately identify each country’s card as they are sorted by color.

Reading: No reading is necessary to play this game.

Children: No questionable topics are in this game.

Who would love this game?

Foodies is a great game for people who aren’t good at board games due to its high luck factor and constant rewards. This game can also be enjoyed by gamers but may not be the best option to play with a group of gamers. Families will enjoy this game as there are no “wrong moves,” and everyone can participate.

Final Thoughts

The Foodies board game is a great game, as it makes you feel rewarded at every turn. This game is a no-brainer when you want to play a quick game without having to think too deeply about each move. The one thing that sometimes keeps it on the shelf is the tedious setup and pack down. If you don’t mind having one person shuffling while another sets up everything else, this shouldn’t be an issue. If you want a quick game to play without taking a lot of brainpower, you may need a copy of Foodies.

If you would like to purchase the Foodies board game and support Tabletop Game Source, you can purchase it from Amazon here.

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