Games that give you a chance to think and plan out your next several moves are fun, but sometimes it’s great just to slap a fast-playing game down on the table and let chaos ensue. Food Fight Frenzy is a dice rolling, speed, pattern recognition, and dexterity game. Dice are rolled and players try to stack their tiles on top of the correct dice without letting the tiles fall off. Play continues over the course of several rounds and the first player to get rid of all their cards wins the game. Food Fight Frenzy is a brief, but fun, game that works well for fans of dexterity titles like Jenga and quick-reaction-time games like the card game Speed.

Food Fight Frenzy
Designer:  Kim Vandenbroucke
Publisher: Ultra PRO
Players: 2-6
Ages: 6+
Time: 5-15 min
(review copy provided by publisher)

Gameplay is pretty simple. Divide up the food tiles among all the players. Each player draws five and puts them face-up on the table. Dice are rolled (more for more players) and then players race to put their tiles on the top of the appropriate dice, only one tile per die (no stacking.) There are six different tiles, each matching one of the faces of the dice, representing a particular food in the food fight. Play continues until someone has no valid place left to place a tile (or they placed all 5 of theirs.) They yell “stop” and all play ceases for that round. Players draw back up to 5 tiles, the dice are rolled again, and off things go. The first player to get rid of all their tiles (including their reserve stack) wins the game.

There are two possible errors a player can make. If their tile is poorly placed and it falls off of a die, they have to stop for the round and will take 2 tiles as a penalty at the end of the round. If a player yells stop too early (they still have tiles left) they’re out for the round and play starts up again. The first player to use up their entire stack of tiles wins the game.

Verdict:
This game falls solidly into that short-game range that works well with the younger set, or possibly older folks looking to kill time before or after a meatier game. There isn’t much strategy involved, it’s just a race to get your tiles out on those dice. The dice are “oversized” but that just means they’re slightly larger than your every-day dice. Thus, if the dice are rolled pretty close together, there can be a bit of a traffic jam while people race to place their tiles. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how the players want to play the game. With younger gamers (and older) there can sometimes be angst over who got in the way of whom. I feel like it is for the best if the roller can get a decent spread on the dice, so everyone has a bit of room to work. The game works with a wide age range, probably the main issue would be for the much older set where fiddling with smallish pieces and recognizing the dice icons would be frustrating. (I’ll note that the game icons are set up so that there shouldn’t be any color-blindness issues either.) 

Kid Factor

As with most dexterity-type games, there is no reading required. This is one of those games that is pretty age-agnostic, perfect for fast-moving family play.

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