Sushi Boat

Do you like sushi? Have you ever seen one of those cool sushi conveyor belts? Have you ever ordered a big old Sushi Boat platter? The game, Sushi Boat, may be just your thing. 

Let’s start with the most obvious thing. After all, one eats first with one’s eyes.  Sushi Boat is a GORGEOUS game. The board is a wooden sushi boat, with an inset “conveyor belt” along one side, into a small tunnel, and then back down the other side. The sushi plates have seven types of sushi on five colours of stackable plates. There are also a bunch of cards, player mats, and other components, which are all very pretty but otherwise fairly standard. 

The gameplay is straightforward:

1. On your turn, you must turn over the top card of the deck. 
2. You must move your pawn to an empty seat
3. You may perform a single action 
4. You must eat sushi (oh nooooo. I have to eat sushi, how terib-nom-nom-snarf.)

1: When you turn over the top card of the deck, if the card is a Side Dish, the symbol on the card will tell you to either fill the sushi boat until the older dish falls into the trash or just until it is full. However, if you reveal a Wasabi card, the game is interrupted by a Wasabi Challenge. During the challenge, players try to remember the colour of the plates hidden in the tunnel at the top of the board. Players keep Wasabi Cubes for each correct guess, which are worth points at the end of the game. 

2. Along the inside and outside of the sushi conveyor belt there are circles on the board representing the seats that you, as a customer, sit in to eat your delicious sushi. Some of these spaces have staff members who give the customer at the seat the option of additional action choices. 

3. There are three basic actions you can take. You can collect 1 Yen from the bank, you can spend 1 Yen to buy the top Side Dish card in the discard pile, or you can spend 1 Yen to visit the staff member at that seat and take their action. Staff actions are all different and range from changing the sushi plate you eat to taking a Wasabi Cube (for a point at the end of the game)

4. Finally you must eat either the sushi in front of you or the sushi a Staff Member has provided you. You then stack that plate on top of your pile. You must always add the plate to the top of your pile and you are not allowed to look at what have eaten previously, only the colour of the plate along the side of your stack. This is important.

At the end of the game, you earn points for every set of multiple plates in a row (minus one, so single plates are worthless) and points per set of different sushi you have eaten. Since you can’t look at your plates, you have to remember what you have to maximize your points. Players also earn points for every Wasabi Cube they collected during the game and based on how many Side Dish cards they played. I love how many paths to victory all of those scoring methods provide. I have a moderately terrible memory, but that doesn’t mean I’m destined to lose because of it. Anyone can be competitive with the strategy they choose.

At the end of the day, Sushi Boat is a simple game. Too simple for some groups to play on a regular basis. However, to help address that, there is an optional ruleset of Menu Cards. Each Menu Card gives an additional scoring opportunity. Most of these cards ask you to have the most/least of something or a specific number of something. But if that still isn’t enough for your group, I still think this is a game that can be enjoyed without being overplayed. If someone says to me “Let’s play Sushi Boat” my answer is probably going to be heck ya.

Japanime Games is online at japanimegames.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/JapanimeGames.