Wasabi!

[Brel]

Wasabi!
By W. Eric Martin

Publisher: Z-Man Games
Designers: Josh Cappel & Adam Gertzbein
Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 45 minutes
Release Date: Q2 2008

If you had to name two things that come to mind when you think of Japan, there’s a good chance you’d say “giant robots” and “sushi.” Strangely enough, these two items are connected in the development of Wasabi!, the first published game from designers Josh Cappel and Adam Gertzbein.

"We’ve spent many years tinkering as a hobby with a vastly huge and complex fighting-robot game,” says Cappel. “It’s a monster: hundreds of components, hundreds of rules, and dozens of exceptions to rules; tedious setup time, totally inaccessible to a casual gamer, too long to play and too long to teach with quite a few gaping loopholes in mechanical logic. We love to play it, but it’s an unpublishable beast in its current form. Wasabi! began its journey as an attempt get as far away as possible from that.”

Their initial approach was to design a speed/dexterity game with players building sushi recipes simultaneously. “It would simulate the chaos of a busy sushi counter in the city,” says Gertzbein. “The idea sounded great on paper, but the prototype bombed totally.”

While keeping the idea of the game – completing sushi recipes – they reconfigured everything else: adding a turn structure, introducing a grid-based playing area, balancing the ingredients, and more. “One of the neatest features is the Pantry,” says Cappel. “Laid out attractively at the side of the board is every ingredient in the game, ready for choosing. After your turn, you can draw whatever you want to refill your hand. That pulls a lot of randomness out of the game – if you ever end up with a hand of tiles you’re not happy with in Wasabi!, you can be pretty sure that it’s your own fault.”

Players now share one gameboard (of variable size depending on the number of players), and the ingredients remain on the board once a recipe has been completed so that other players can build off what’s already there. When you complete a recipe, you receive a special action – Chop!, Stack!, Switch!, Spicy!, and Wasabi! – that can be used later, and these took a lot of work to balance. Says Cappel, “The five we settled upon confer a good range of interesting abilities and allow many creative options towards completing recipes, foiling opponents’ plans, and earning points.”

Asked how the number of players changes the game play, Gertzbein says, “We find that in a two-player game, the focus is a lot heavier on disrupting your opponent. Being delayed for a round or two makes a significant impact in Wasabi!, so if the recipe you’re building gets Chopped, Wasabied, or otherwise ruined before you can finish it, your opponent will spring ahead.”

“In a four-player game,” Gertzbein continues, “it is not as profitable to disrupt one other opponent. Sure, your effort might slow that one player down, but the other two players are unimpeded and can spend their own efforts on their own progress. The challenge becomes staying observant and flexible. More tiles hit the board between your turns, (and the board fills up relatively faster) so it becomes more important to make best use of what gets laid down by other players. If you can notice several parts of a multi-part recipe already out there and in sequence, you are better off using them than wasting your effort on placing duplicates.”

While the winner of most games will be determined by points, an instant win is possible if a player completes ten recipes. “It’s extremely difficult to achieve,” says Cappel. “Since the game design stabilized, we’ve seen only two instant wins in dozens of playtests.”

“In the end,” says Cappel, “Wasabi! ended up being everything we were aiming for: Easy to learn, fun to play, at the sweet spot on length, and enjoyable by all types of players. It is a game that you can definitely improve at and have strategy for, but it’s fun the first time you play it as well. It isn’t directly competitive all of the time, but as the board inexorably fills up and playing space starts to run out there are definite moments of heartbreaking (and frequently unintentional) screwage. Getting close to completing, say, a five-part Squid Salad Sandwich with style for an eleven-point leap is surprisingly nerve-wracking as you pray that nobody will interrupt your careful plans.”

Source: boardgamenews.com

[Brel]

According to Z-man's official website, release date for this game is on November 2008. 

[Brel]

A review from BGG by Kristof Tersago (Musti):

What’s it about?
Be the best sushi-chef by making the most rewarding recipes before the kitchen is full or before somebody completes all his orders.

How does it work?
The idea of the game is to make sushi-recipes with different ingredients by placing the required ingredients in a straight line on the central board. There are recipes containing from two to five ingredients, which give you 2 to 8 points (or more).
The gameboard is a 5 by 5, 6 or 7 grid, depending on the number of players.

At the start of the game, each player pîcks three ingredients and three recipes.

During your turn you only have to place an ingredient on the board. But this can trigger a series of events.

Most likely you have created one of your three recipes. You show the recipe to the other players and place one of your point tokens on the recipe. If the ingredients are in the same order as on the recipe card, you can get up to three bonus cubes. On top of this you can draw one of 5 different action cards. These give you extra possibilities going from taking an ingredient tile of the board, switching two tiles, playing extra ingredients and so on.
Since you can play these cards at any time during your turn, you can set-up a cascade of events enabling you to complete several recipes in one turn.

At the end of your turn, you draw tiles and recipes so you have three of each.

The game ends once a player has complete ten recipes or if the kitchen is filled with ingredients. Points are awarded for completed recipes and bonus cubes. Winner is he who has the most points.

Where is the fun?
The game description above may sound similar to other games you have already played. And although the game is pretty repetitive in the first two or three turns, it gets pretty interesting as the game progresses. The trick of the game is to play the action cards at the right moment and to make sure you can collect those extra bonus cubes.

The game is fast and might feel chaotic but careful planning and a flexibel approach gives a lot of fun and opportunities.

Why should I like this?
- High level of interaction
- Fast gameplay with lots of possibilities

Why shouldn’t I like this?
- Can lead to analysis paralysis
- Might be too chaotic for some if played with four players

Final verdict
'Wasabi!' is one of those pleasant surprised that often slip under the radar. It stands out to similar games due to the fast gameplay and the tactical possibilities created by the action cards.The gameplay is elegant and easy to explain. Perfectly spiced and recommended.

Source: boardgamegeek.com

[Brel]

Game demo at Essen 2008

[viscoos]

I'm planning to get this... pero next year na stop na muna ako sa 12 games this year 

I think nothing can beat a game about food 

[Brel]

Click here to view/download the English rules of WASABI! in Adobe PDF format. 

[maskmanjoe]

Wasabi has seen a slow but steady rise in BGG. It looks like an interesting gateway game, and alot of players are tagging it as a warm-up game as well, type of game that you play to start your gaming session right light and quick and easy to teach, seems like a good girlfriend-who-doesnt-play type of game as well  I like the cups and the green wasabi cubes

[maskmanjoe]

After playing it thrice since getting it last Friday, I must say I was surprised to get mixed emotions about it. Its a definite eye candy and is lovely to look at, but I got a bitin feeling after playing a few rounds. Fully knowing its a quick gateway game, I felt it was a little too light. My gaming friends are addicts though, they Wasabi-ed 3 times in one sitting at work

[viscoos]

Its too light for me 

I think it will be on the same boat as TtR in terms of gatewayness.  Philippine culture wise I think this has more pull than the other gateways due to our love of food, especially rice. 

What I like about the game is that, most of the time after playing Wasabi I get this feeling of wanting to go to a Japanese resto to eat... bakit kaya?

[Titus]

I feel the same way after playing it twice. There's just too little control. You're at the mercy of the recipes you draw and the tiles your opponents place. Unfortunate since the theme and components are great.

[Gaebril]

Played it just once (4player). The game looks random at first, but I find the luck factor is actually pretty small. Admittedly there's a lot of screwage and parasitism going on.. but I find that kind of interaction acceptable. As far as control goes, you really need the power cards once the game hits the halfway point. But once you get rolling, you should be able to try for a recipie each turn.

As others have said, it's a very pretty game. Replayability is indeed a concern... more plays are needed to find out how quickly it gets boring.

[Brel]

Basement Boardgamer Review

[ChineezPnoy]

...My gaming friends are addicts though, they Wasabi-ed 3 times in one sitting at work

Dang, I wanna get paid playing 

[Brel]

My family likes this one.  The game is simple yet not too light.  The matching mechanics makes the rules sort of universally accessible.  The cute components and theme made the game even more attractive. 

[maskmanjoe]

An officemate of mine got a copy of this game (from you too I think, Brel) and thoroughly enjoyed it with his little sister at home. When he introduced it to his new workplace (he soon became a faculty member in a university), his math-inclined co-professor put together a probability matrix and killed the game for all of them by winning all the time Moral of the story, never play with math majors

Although Wasabi! still isnt a game for me, it remains among the most visually appealing games in my collection. I rank it 1st in my gateway games, next to Blue Moon City.