Sandwich

Year
2010
Publisher
Author
Christophe Raimbault
Players
3 - 6
Age
6 - 199
Time
15
StrategyLuck
InteractionComponents & Design
ComplexityScore

Sometimes you’re looking for a short, fun game to pass some time. You’re in a bigger group and the rest is just finishing another game, it’s late, but not quite that late that you want to leave already or you want to squeeze in a game because it’s just a few more minutes until dinner’s ready.

Just perfect? Sandwich. Not only as dinner but also Christophe Raimbault’s game of the same name.

Sandwich only takes about 15 minutes, or even less if you’re fast, but you can also play it for hours: „how about another round?!“

The Good
The Good

Ingredients:

  • 56 cards
  • pen and paper, or other method of keeping score

Preparation method:

  • Deal each player a number of cards. Nobody sees what they’re dealt.
  • Now everybody turns their first card at the same time and each take the card you want the most, that is not your own. Unless you’re too slow, then you take the left overs!
  • Repeat until all cards are redistributed.
  • Market time. Every player can offer cards to the other players to trade, to hopefully get better ingredients.
  • Make 3 sandwiches with 3 ingredients each.
  • Give the sandwiches to the other players.
  • Look at the sandwiches you got and cringe. Decide which one you like best, second best and which one you don’t like.
  • Each player gives out points for sandwiches, 3 for the best, 1 for the second best, none for the worst.
  • Enjoy!
The Bad
The Bad

Calories: Depending on how lively 2. and 3. get there might be lots of calories burned, but you also might get quite hungry, if you’re lucky enough to be offered tasty sandwiches.

Serves: 3- 6 players.

Time: about 15 minutes with 5 minutes per round

How many cards you deal out and how many sandwiches you serve changes with the number of players. With how many players you can play depends a bit on how many languages you can speak – for some reasons the rules don’t cover everything in each language. French has the rules for 3, 5 and 6 players, more than 6 players and some variants, English only for 5 players and up, Spanish lists the rules for 5 and up and for 3 players and German only offers the rules for 3 players. Since the rules are pretty easy and each sandwich has to have 3 ingredients it’s not that hard to do the math.

If you don’t speak French at all, you miss the variants, though:

Pizza: in the second round you prepare a pizza (dough with tomatoe sauce as base) instead of a sandwhich.

... and the downright disgusting
... and the downright disgusting

The worst sandwich: in the third round the most disgusting sandwich gets the most points.

Suggestion du chef: hand out your sandwiches with ingredients visible. When giving your sandwich to your neighbour, describe with how much love and passion you prepared them and describe it’s merits… it’s all in the presentation!

The variant for „up to 12 players“ suggests to add a second box of material.

Whether you score points or not depends a bit on your knowledge of the other players: some people think honey, goat cheese and walnuts are a very tasty combination, so you get three points, but the same person might think that having mustard on your hamburger patty is just gross. As one of our test players said: it’s a great game to get to know each other – and in some cases even learn about another person’s allergies. There can be a bit of chaos when you’re trying to snatch cards – Ligretto, anyone? Our house rule is: the person who got hurt is most likely the one whose hand was at the bottom of the pile and thus the first and keeper of the card.

The sandwich variants vary from „oh yummy!“ to „ewww….“ and you wouldn’t believe how stomach turning some combinations can be, if you have a active imagination. It can be quite inspiring and a great challenge, depending on which ingredients you manage to snatch. As the rules state: sometimes you can’t really choose the best tasting but just the least disgusting one.

Sandwich is fast and fun. Playing with less than 3 players doesn’t make much sense, but it doesn’t matter if you’re just 3 or 6. The translation omissions are a bummer, but the cards have nice illustrations and the box is very robust, so overall the game has a pretty good quality. The game is just the perfect snack: light, fast and you’ll like it time after time again. Just don’t play it when you’re hungry!

Incidentally, publisher Le Joueur is in search of distributors basically everywhere in the world, so if you are in the business of selling games and this review gave you an appetite, they’d be delighted to hear from you.

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