Matthew Bailey
On the second day of Christmas
My children played with me…
Three perfect dishes!
Two risky predictions!
And a monster as big as a tree.
We’ve already had some excellent card games this holiday season, and today, Umami: The Forest Food Fest is going to be absolutely no different. Umami is a really good card game, not a perfect one, but definitely one worth your attention.
In the game, you are building small sets of ingredient cards in front of you, trying to match the patterns shown on shared Favourite cards. Each turn is pretty straightforward. You always play two ingredient cards, one from your hand and one from the face-up market, placing them into vertical columns called dishes. You can start new dishes or add to existing ones, but each dish can only ever hold three ingredients, so you are constantly deciding where best to place each card. It’s a hand management game as much as a set collection game, and it is a nice amalgamation of the two.
The Favourite cards are the main objective and sit face-up in the centre of the table. Each Favourite shows a specific requirement, usually a combination of colours or a run of numbers. As soon as one of your dishes matches a Favourite exactly, you immediately claim it, even if it is not your turn. That Favourite is placed above the dish, locking it in place so nothing can be added, removed, or individual ingredients stolen from it for the rest of the game.
However, claimed Favourites are not always safe. Each Favourite also shows whether it prefers a higher or lower total value. If another player, or you, creates a matching dish with a better total in the correct direction, you can take that Favourite from another player, even from one of their already set dishes. If multiple players qualify at the same time, ties are broken using blossom icons on the ingredients.
Some ingredient cards include special icons that add a bit of interaction. Steal icons allow you, once per turn, to discard that card in order to take an ingredient from another player’s unfinished dish and add it to one of your own. Blossom icons are used to break ties when multiple players are competing for the same Favourite at the same time, and star icons are important for scoring at the end of the game.
The game begins to wrap up once the final Favourite is taken, or once a player has built up a large number of ingredients in their dishes. After a short final phase, players score points based on the stars shown on their claimed Favourites and the ingredients beneath them. The player with the most points wins, with blossoms acting as the tie-breaker if needed.
It’s a very tidy, nice little card game that mixes quite a few elements of different game types to create a really good amalgamation of the two. I don’t think the game is perfect, and there are a few elements, mainly to do with the end, that I’m not massively keen on. One of the first issues is the fact that you win the game using stars, and these stars can come from Favourites that you’ve claimed or alternatively from ingredients. Not all ingredients have stars, which means that some of your things are going to give you more points than others. While this isn’t currently a problem, it feels a little bit counterintuitive when the stars aren’t really a key part of making the dishes, but you need the stars in order to win. You could theoretically make your dishes with no stars quite comfortably and, even though you’ve made all your dishes, not get any stars from them. I’m not saying it’s absolutely game-breaking, but it is an element of the game I wasn’t as keen on.
Finally, and this is probably actually a good thing, I thought the game could have gone on a little bit longer. It felt like it ended quite quickly, and we got through getting the Favourites and making those dishes a lot faster than I would have expected. I felt we would have all quite liked a few more rounds to try and gain points and try to spread things out at the end. The amount of points we had was all in single digits, and obviously, when you’re playing a game with scores in single digits, you’re quite often going to end up with ties. While there is a way to sort out tie-breakers, I’d always rather not use one if I can avoid it.
That last little bit probably came across as a bit of a negative, but actually, I really enjoyed Umami: The Forest Food Fest. Both Jack(10) and Toby(7) really enjoyed it I think it’s a really good, quite unique card game, nice set collection with good hand management, and overall it’s a really nice game to play with family, young and old alike.
Disclaimer: A copy of “Umami: The Forest Food Fest” was kingly gifted to me by CGE. No incentive was given for a positive review and all of our thoughts and opinions are our own.
