Burger Balance

From any game with alliteration in its title, I expect upbeat gameplay with high stakes (or in this case, steaks) and even higher levels of fun. Burger Balance was no exception. From the game’s style to similarities with other family favourites, Burger Balance gives lots to be considered. In this review (aside from making you hungry) I will give you the intel to help you decide… is Burger Balance worth it?

The game

In this burger-sized blue box, you can expect to find two halves of a small wooden burger bun, some slices of wooden bacon, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, beef and cheese, a wooden ketchup bottle, a six-sided die and, of course, some instructions.

I had low expectations going into Burger Balance as I thought the quirky, cartoony style on the front of the box wouldn’t extend to its interior, but I was wrong. The pieces are probably my favourite part about this game. With a deeply satisfying colour palate, each ingredient is very satisfying to hold and use throughout gameplay. In fact, the whole style of the game is fun.

Each side of the die has the colour of an ingredient on it, which will be explained shortly (although you may be able to guess where that’s going). One downside to this particular piece is that the colours of the patty (brown) and the tomato (deep red) are a little too similar, and misreading was a recurring issue during gameplay. This can also depend on lighting, but it’s definitely something to consider.

Gameplay

The game is not completely as simple as it looks, although it is still very easy to get to grips with how it runs. You start by placing the bottom bun on the top of the ketchup bottle, then set up your beginning burger by stacking pieces as dictated by the die. At this point, you can choose how difficult you want the game to be: if you are a beginner, or you’re looking for a relaxing (or even just a longer) game, you use more ingredients- up to fourteen. For a harder session, you use fewer ingredients.

To be honest, it was at this point where I stumbled at the first hurdle; in front of me was a game called ‘burger balance‘, and I was presented with a flat bun that slotted perfectly into the top of the ketchup bottle and some flat ingredients. My arrogance- and my dislike of reading rules- got the better of me, so we began just stacking the ingredients on the bun without any guidance. Once we got through all the ingredients and our behemoth of a burger stayed standing strong, I thought it best to check. Obviously, this was not correct.

So now you, dear reader, are in the lucky position of not having to read the rulebook for the basic game, and you also don’t have to go through the embarrassment of not knowing what you’re doing. Once you’ve set up your starter ingredients and you’ve placed the top bun to make a bone-afide burger (see what I did there?), each player takes it in turns to roll the ingredient die.

In the same way as during setup, the ingredient you roll is the one you place. This time, however, as the name might have you guessing, you balance the ingredient in one of the slots created by the other preexisting misshaped ingredients. The stakes get higher as the burger grows more grotesque, as if you make some pieces fall and the burger stays intact, you must replace them all, plus an equal amount of new pieces as a penalty. You keep going until you run out of ingredients, someone drops one or more pieces three times in a row or the burger fails to balance, at which point you clear it up and start again.

But… is it fun?

Overall, I would absolutely class this game as fun. The style: fun. The gameplay: fun. At least for a while.

If you’ve ever played Jenga, you’ll pretty much know what to expect. But, instead of beige wooden blocks going upwards, you have colourful wooden rounds going outwards. The interaction between players is also a slight difference worth noting; we all know the intense, suspense-filled silence when the tower is relying on a single block for a foundation and there seems to be no other sensible moves. That is still prevalent in Burger Balance, but not as much as you might find in Jenga. The game is often over too quick for the suspense to build that much, and the pieces are so darn cute that even if the burger falls at your hand, you’ll be sort of glad to still have the incriminating lettuce in your hand.

This game is more family friendly than Jenga as well. Which is saying something, because Jenga is already pretty family friendly. Both are labelled as 8+, but I have memories of not quite being able to keep up with the other players because I wasn’t tall enough to reach the top, and, I suppose, my not yet fully developed fine motor skills weren’t quite up to the task. The fun colours, and the little disks that plop quite nicely in the available spots, screams ‘family fun’ a little more than Jenga does.

That being said, you might want to have this as only one small part of your Games Night. The novelty does begin to wear off after a while, and you start to feel like you’re working at McDonald’s with all that burger forming. When it’s good it’s good, and then it ought to sit in the cupboard for a little while.

Overall

Burger balance is fun, freakish and family-friendly. The pieces are great and the game makes for a great fifteen minutes or so. However, Burger Balance is not a classic. I made lots of comparisons to Jenga in this review, and for good reason. The award for most classic stacking game is still firmly in the grip of Jenga, but this is a quirky alternative. Burger Balance would make a great gift for a burger lover and would definitely be enjoyed by almost anyone, but don’t expect a new refined version of chess or something equally as cerebral from this silly box of wood.