LogFAQs > #961553449

here's one people might have played

65. Sushi Roll

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/271869/sushi-roll

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Set collection, drafting
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 20-30 minutes
First played: 2021
Experience: 1 play, 5 players
Previous ranks: N/A

Sushi Roll logically follows Sushi Go, a game in which you draft cards, 7 Wonders-style, and assemble the best meal you can. The game is played over the course of three rounds during which you draft a handful of dice, one by one, each of a different food type - sashimi, nigiri, dumplings, and the like. Your meal is scored depending on how many of each you got.

It's really hard to talk about Sushi Roll without comparing it to its predecessor, Sushi Go. It borrows essentially the exact same template - and it's fun to try to go for safe strategies (i.e. the food items that score rather consistently) or the risky strategies (i.e. ones that will score explosively but *only* if you've got a lot of them). Sushi Roll also introduces a neat mechanism where you can "steal" other people's dice. The dice themselves are super-cute - arguably cuter than the cards - and I love the little conveyor belt cardboard tokens that you use to pass the dice on after you've made your selections. They even introduce a mechanism by which you can "steal" someone else's food item right off their conveyor belt!

The issue with Sushi Roll, then, is that the action isn't simultaneous. One of the coolest parts of Sushi Go is that this lightweight game has you making your decision while everyone else is making theirs. Therefore, it scales absolutely seamlessly. Sushi Roll gets rid of arguably its parent game's best feature, instead making things turn-based. You have to keep track of start player and then remember when you hit start player so you can rotate the belts. That layer of fiddliness means that the game will take more time with more players and that you need to keep track of more options (as you can steal other people's dice).

I think in a vacuum, Sushi Roll is pretty good - and probably better with three or four players for quickness. I was a little surprised at how long it took to play Roll, but it's still a neat game where you score points for eating dumplings and adding nigiri to your nigiri, which honestly is all that you really want out of a game anyway.