Matthew BaileyGame 27# of the “Now & Then Summer Marathon 2024” is “Diced Veggies” played with Jack(9) and Katie(37).
It’s been quite a few days since I’ve posted a negative review, and today is not going to be an exception. In fact, quite the opposite: “Diced Veggies” is quite possibly one of my new favourite lightweight games.
You start the game by setting up the frame, then putting all of the dice into it and shaking it to form a block. This block represents your ingredients for making recipes. You then make a deck of the hype cards and the recipe cards, and lay out three recipe cards in a display. Each player gets one hype card, two recipe cards, and one chef token.
On your turn, you do three things. Firstly, you use the awesome cardboard cleaver to cut and slide away a certain amount of the block, with the restriction that the total must always add up to 10 or less. Interestingly, the dice in this game start at two, with there being two number twos and no number ones, meaning that it is rare to take more than three or four dice in one go.
Those dice then represent your ingredients. Your second action is to use them to try and fulfil recipes. At this point, the numbers do not matter for completing recipes unless your hype cards are being used. Essentially, your hype cards add an extra restriction for making your recipe to modify it for extra points. These can include requirements such as all the numbers adding up to 19, all the dice being sequential, or using double ingredients and then multiplying the card’s value by two.
If things aren’t going your way, you can use your chef token to either change the type of ingredient or change the number. Once you’ve done this, you then have to take either a new hype card or a new recipe card and discard down to a maximum of eight dice, two hype cards, and two recipe cards.
Another action worth noting is that at the start of your turn, you can choose to restock. If you choose to restock, everyone who spent their chef token gets it back. You roll all spent leftover dice into the frame and then shape it into a block close to a square or rectangle. Play then continues as normal.
After the first person completes six recipes, the game ends. You add up the scores to find out who the winner is.
As well as the standard rules, there are some really nice suggestions in the manual for how to play the game with much younger children. These include playing without the hype cards, reducing the number of recipe completions to shorten the game, or not including adding up to 10 when cutting the dice and instead allowing each person to take three dice. This is a welcome addition that isn’t included in enough games. While we didn’t play with these rules, I am keen to try this simpler version with Henry and will definitely give it a go over the next week or so.
I had heard a bit about “Diced Veggies” and knew it was fairly popular, but I went into this with neutral expectations and came out absolutely adoring this game. The gameplay, involving trying to get the dice you need to match the recipes while also deciding if it’s worth trying to achieve a hype card, is really compelling.
The component quality is really high. The box is sturdy cardboard, the dice are nice and chunky, and the act of cutting the dice with the cleaver is very enjoyable. All three of us absolutely adored this game, and it’s probably the most unanimous we’ve been about a game in a long time. You can pick it up for just over £20, making it really good value. I cannot recommend “Diced Veggies” more strongly.
