The race is on to build the best burgers, make them big and juicy and filled with all manner of delicious ingredients. Sounds great, but in practice this one is falling very flat for me.
I bought the game because my friend and I have a tradition of eating gourmet burgers in various pubs and restaurants. I watched the reviews and read around a little to see what other people were saying and the word was generally good. Now a caveat here, I have only played it twice but so far I’m finding it awfully dull.
First up, our plays have taken about an hour and a half each, which is double the recommended time on the box. Given how light this game is, it takes way too long to play. The reason for this brings me to my second point, the Burgers themselves. There are three burgers face up on the table that you can build. If you don’t have the ingredients for them well you’re stuffed. Someone else takes the one you were building towards you’re stuffed. You’re lucky enough to be able to build two burgers? You can only do one, you’ll have to hope the other one is still there in four turns.
Then the book keeping between rounds in laborious. At the end of each round you put a coin on each unbuilt burger. However, some burgers can remain unbuilt for a long time and you have to keep adding coins, changing coins for larger denominations, begging borrowing and stealing change from other players etc. In one game we played there were 21 coins on a burger before someone could build it. Which brings me to my final point, placing a coin on each burger just causes massive point swings. Why does it matter when the burger gets completed, why is a player netting themselves 31 points for being lucky enough to get the right set of ingredients (and it is luck not skill). The game also awards a 5 point bonus to the player who built the most burgers, but if you tie no-one gets the points. This is a stupid rule, you can easily forego building bigger burgers to build more, hoping for a bonus five points only to have it taken off you.
I like the way you build the burgers, I like the lightness and the theme but this should have been a 20 minute game, not 45 and certainly not 90! I’m finding it hard to recommend this one I’m afraid. Maybe more plays will help, but I’m thinking it may be homebrew time.