If you ate ramen as much as I do, you’d be delighted by Mixlore’s Ramen Fury game. Mixlore is an Asmodee studio and produces several games based on Netflix shows, including Squid Game, Ozark, and the Queen’s Gambit, along with other standalone games like Ogre Under, Robot or Not, and Ramen Fury. Ramen Fury is a deck-building game where players are in a ramen restaurant trying to build the perfect bowl of ramen.
What’s in the box? First of all, the packaging is adorable! The outer package is resealable and is designed to look like a ramen package. Inside is a box that holds the cards and it looks like a block of ramen noodles. In addition to the cards, which are bowls and ramen ingredients, there is a cardboard set of ramen spoons. The ramen ingredients are divided into suits, including broths, proteins, and vegetables, plus two types of garnish cards: Chili peppers and Nori, of course. The garnish cards have special rules. TOP TIP: We kept the cardboard sheet that the spoons came in so we could keep track of them, because they are pretty small.
How to play Ramen Fury:
Setting up Ramen Fury is fairly simple. Each player gets three bowls (bowl cards) and two spoons (the little spoon tokens). The bowls are laid in a row in front of each player. The ingredient cards are shuffled and then each player is dealt three cards (don’t let the other players see!). The ingredient deck is set in the center of the play area (dining table?) and the top four cards from the deck are laid out face up to form the pantry (where else would you store your ingredients?). Whoever ate ramen last goes first. If you serve ramen for dinner before the game, eat really slowly so you can go first!
There are several actions that players can take on each turn, but they have to do two (including two of the same action, if that’s best for your bowl). The spoons are used to steal ingredients from any bowl on the table (including your own). That’s because once you start building a bowl, you can’t move the ingredients around. The spoons give you two chances to pull the perfect ingredient into your bowl, even if it’s just rearranging your own ramen bowls.
How to win Ramen Fury:
Eat your ramen! (Slurping sound effects optional, but fun!) You earn points based on the bowls of ramen you build and eat. Eating a bowl of ramen locks it to your score, so no-one can steal from it anymore. The game ends after the first player has finished three bowls of ramen. Each of the other players gets one last turn and then the bowls are scored. The instructions booklet has scoring examples to help you understand how the scoring works.
The game is marked 8+ for age recommendations and, given the relative difficulty of the game and the size of the spoons, it’s probably better not to let really little kids play unsupervised. Ramen Fury is for 2-5 players, so it’s perfect for family game night! If more than five of you want to play, combine two decks. If you’re into fun facts, the last page of the instruction’s booklet is all about ramen and its place in Japanese culture. Yum!
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٭٭٭٭٭Highly recommended!
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