Maths is hard, it’s one of the few things in life where there are no real shortcuts to learning, you just simply need to acquire that knowledge through repetition and rationalising. Blobby’s Pizza is aimed at making learning fractions fun by combining them with monsters and pizza, and it’s pretty effective!
There are a lot of educational games out there that simply aren’t fun, so it’s always great when one comes along that is genuinely clever and fun. Blobby’s Pizza fits the bill, not only serving as educational experience but also a really solid competitive game complete with great theming. You and your fellow players are each dining at Chef Blobby’s pizzeria, this guy’s a giant rainbow blob with a chef hat and is apparently pretty popular being that there are also seven other monsters dining at the restaurant.
Players are each dealt a hand which they then play from. There are a variety of cards: Monster cards, which allow you to steal up to a certain fraction of pizza pieces from other players; Pizza slices, which you’ll play on your table in front of you until you have a full pizza that you can eat; Tax and tip cards, which can serve as multipliers at end of play; And, switch and swap cards which can force players to trade hands. You have the ability to move cards between your hand and in front of you during your turn, which adds a strategic layer to the game as other players playing monsters can steal from any other player’s table but not their hands, however, you need to store cards on the table because that’s the only way to be able to keep drawing up beyond completing pizzas.
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Each pizza is divided into 12 slices, with cards containing everything from 1/12 up to 10/12 of each of the four types of pizza. You’ll need exactly 12 slices of the same pizza type in order to eat it and remove it from the game. When you do eat it, you can note it down on the included order pad — which is a really fun way of keeping score.
In addition to the strategy of moving cards between your hand and table, there’s also a major opportunity to leap ahead in scoring through clever use of the monsters. Each of the seven monsters can eat up to a certain fraction with none of the monster’s fractions displayed as twelfths and so it requires a little thinking for juniors. Playing a Chomper, which eats up to 3/4s of a pizza, means that you could nab up to 9 slices of pizza, which could see you gaining enough slices to finish several pizzas. These make for a fun catch-up mechanic, and they also play into the end conditions of Blobby’s Pizza — which is that play ends when Chef Blobby is played, but that he can only be played after at least one of every other monster is played.
All in all, Blobby’s Pizza is a really easy to learn board game that features enough strategy to keep older players interested and has a fun theme that means that kids don’t realise that they’re actually reinforcing their math skills. This one is definitely a keeper for us.
Blobby’s Pizza is available from Sempter Smart Games’ website as well as online retailers like Amazon.
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