Game Preview: Wasabi!

By W. Eric Martin
February 20, 2008

Publisher: Z-Man Games
Designers: Josh Cappel & Adam Gertzbein
Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 45 minutes
Release Date: Q2 2008

If you had to name two things that come to mind when you think of Japan, there’s a good chance you’d say “giant robots” and “sushi.” Strangely enough, these two items are connected in the development of Wasabi!, the first published game from designers Josh Cappel and Adam Gertzbein.

"We’ve spent many years tinkering as a hobby with a vastly huge and complex fighting-robot game,” says Cappel. “It’s a monster: hundreds of components, hundreds of rules, and dozens of exceptions to rules; tedious setup time, totally inaccessible to a casual gamer, too long to play and too long to teach with quite a few gaping loopholes in mechanical logic. We love to play it, but it’s an unpublishable beast in its current form. Wasabi! began its journey as an attempt get as far away as possible from that.”

Their initial approach was to design a speed/dexterity game with players building sushi recipes simultaneously. “It would simulate the chaos of a busy sushi counter in the city,” says Gertzbein. “The idea sounded great on paper, but the prototype bombed totally.”

While keeping the idea of the game – completing sushi recipes – they reconfigured everything else: adding a turn structure, introducing a grid-based playing area, balancing the ingredients, and more. “One of the neatest features is the Pantry,” says Cappel. “Laid out attractively at the side of the board is every ingredient in the game, ready for choosing. After your turn, you can draw whatever you want to refill your hand. That pulls a lot of randomness out of the game – if you ever end up with a hand of tiles you’re not happy with in Wasabi!, you can be pretty sure that it’s your own fault.”

Players now share one gameboard (of variable size depending on the number of players), and the ingredients remain on the board once a recipe has been completed so that other players can build off what’s already there. When you complete a recipe, you receive a special action – Chop!, Stack!, Switch!, Spicy!, and Wasabi! – that can be used later, and these took a lot of work to balance. Says Cappel, “The five we settled upon confer a good range of interesting abilities and allow many creative options towards completing recipes, foiling opponents’ plans, and earning points.”

Asked how the number of players changes the game play, Gertzbein says, “We find that in a two-player game, the focus is a lot heavier on disrupting your opponent. Being delayed for a round or two makes a significant impact in Wasabi!, so if the recipe you’re building gets Chopped, Wasabied, or otherwise ruined before you can finish it, your opponent will spring ahead.”

“In a four-player game,” Gertzbein continues, “it is not as profitable to disrupt one other opponent. Sure, your effort might slow that one player down, but the other two players are unimpeded and can spend their own efforts on their own progress. The challenge becomes staying observant and flexible. More tiles hit the board between your turns, (and the board fills up relatively faster) so it becomes more important to make best use of what gets laid down by other players. If you can notice several parts of a multi-part recipe already out there and in sequence, you are better off using them than wasting your effort on placing duplicates.”

While the winner of most games will be determined by points, an instant win is possible if a player completes ten recipes. “It’s extremely difficult to achieve,” says Cappel. “Since the game design stabilized, we’ve seen only two instant wins in dozens of playtests.”

“In the end,” says Cappel, “Wasabi! ended up being everything we were aiming for: Easy to learn, fun to play, at the sweet spot on length, and enjoyable by all types of players. It is a game that you can definitely improve at and have strategy for, but it’s fun the first time you play it as well. It isn’t directly competitive all of the time, but as the board inexorably fills up and playing space starts to run out there are definite moments of heartbreaking (and frequently unintentional) screwage. Getting close to completing, say, a five-part Squid Salad Sandwich with style for an eleven-point leap is surprisingly nerve-wracking as you pray that nobody will interrupt your careful plans.”

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I read the rules for this that Z-Man has placed online (http://files.boardgamegeek.com/geekfile_view.php?fileid=30668) and I was quite impressed by them.  There are some interesting new mechanics which look clever and the theme and appearance are very attractive.  I can particularly see this working well as a two-player with my Sushi-loving wife.  I’m looking forward to the release.  Great job, Josh and Adam! Posted by Larry Levy on Feb 20, 2008 at 10:50 AM | #

I am looking foward to this as a game that has an interesting theme that is likely to appeal to the non-gaming crowd in my family. Posted by Rob Cannon on Feb 20, 2008 at 11:58 AM | #

Looks wonderful.  I’ve been waiting for this one.  Reading the rules only makes me want it more.  Can’t wait. Posted by Scotty Dickey on Feb 21, 2008 at 11:54 PM | #

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