After our trip to Egypt, we were all feeling a bit peckish so we decided to turn our hand to creating sushi recipes in Wasabi, a Z-Man game designed by Joshua Cappel and Adam Gertzbein. This is a tile placement game where you are trying to make a string of connected ingredients that match those required by your recipe cards. And if the ingredients are in the right order, you finish that recipe “with style”, which earns you bonus points.

This was a bit of a brain burner and we all thought that certain players in our group might be prone to over-analyse the options available to them. It didn’t help matters in our game that Mark K kept mixing up the Rice tiles for Maki and so finding that what he had carefully planned to do in advance wouldn’t work so he had to do something else. With four players, we all seemed to find that our plans kept getting messed with between turns by the other players, so it was difficult to plan too far ahead. I got close to completing my final recipe (which would have given me an immediate win), but the kitchen just got filled in time by Mark G to end the game. Both Tom and I were on our last recipe at that point, so it looked to be between the two of us, but when the dust settled, I emerged as the winner.

I quite liked Wasabi but this game took a bit longer than it should, due to much scratching of heads by the four of us trying to work out how to fill our recipes. We thought it would probably play better as a two or three player game, where turns come around quicker and there was more chance of planning ahead. Still a good game that was simple to play and with an approachable theme that would make it good for family play.