Pizza Party turned up as a Christmas gift for our family. I hadn’t heard of it before and it was far removed from the heavy euro games I typically play. It turns out that it provided plenty of raucous fun over the festive period. Now the decorations are away and the January doldrums are upon us, is Pizza Party enough to keep the gaming party going?
Rapid Real Time Gameplay is the Key Ingredient.
Pizza Party is a simple 2 player game. Each player has five dice with a different ingredient depicted on each face. Each player takes a pizza card which shows anywhere between 2 and 5 ingredients. Players roll and reroll their dice, placing matching ones on the pizza card. Once all ingredients are matched, shout ‘Mama Mia’, grab a new pizza slice from the stack and repeat. The first player to complete 6 slices (and thus a full pizza) wins.
That is the game in its entirety.
Pizza Party is very much a family weight game and it is very random. Draw into a series of lower ingredient cards and you will probably romp to victory. Find yourself rolling sausage, when all you need is a shrimp and you can kiss your chances of pizza perfection goodbye.
Games that are this light and with very little in the way of player agency are almost never my cup of tea. Yet I actually can’t help but enjoy Pizza Party. The simple act of rolling and rerolling dice as fast as I can reminds me of a much bigger game, Project Elite and the same particular brand of fun is present here. The pressure builds as your opponent’s repeated cries of ‘Mama Mia’ start to sound like a death knell to your hopes of pizza crafting glory.
The best thing? Anyone can play and you’ll be done well inside 5 minutes.
If you want your Pizza Party to cater for more than just 2 players, the game can be scaled by combining sets. Each set allows for an additional 2 players and, in theory, there is no limit to how large your games get.
Style Over Substance.
Pizza Party has nice, fun, dice and the pizza slice cards are bright and clear. In some ways I wish they weren’t shaped like sectors of a circular pizza though. It makes shuffling them at the start of the game harder than it should be.
The clear plastic box, whilst nice for showing off its pizza slice shape and those pretty dice, isn’t the most practical for storage. Yes, it’s small enough to pop in a drawer, but the lid has a tendency to dislodge easily.
It’s probably clear by now that there isn’t really a lot to Pizza Party. It’s great for a daft 5 minutes with a friend or family member, but it is really more activity than game. That said, I can think of many daft filler games that take way longer to play than this one and do not have that sense of frantic fun and laughter between the players.
One to Take Away?
I find myself genuinely enjoying the odd 5 minute game of Pizza Party, especially with younger family members, who are as likely to win as not. Like its food namesake, Pizza Party should probably be best enjoyed in smaller portions and not every day. It won’t set your gaming world alight, but if your brain needs a break from all those heavy strategy games, playing 5-10 minutes of Pizza Party will remind you how, ultimately, games should be about unadulterated fun.
Soon enough, you’ll be done and can get back to the serious business of strategic board gaming. Perhaps even with a smile on your face and that is something Pizza Party can deliver.
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