We love food and we love games about food, so we were pretty excited to try Takeout: The Card Game! This game is designed for two to four players and takes about 30 minutes to an hour to play through, while you shuffle food to and from your plate in an attempt to have a perfect balance.
Takeout puts you at a buffet. In front of you on the table is your plate area, a deck of face down cards representing the kitchen, and a face up stack of food representing the food on the table. On your turn, you need to perform three different moves. First, you need to either take one card from the kitchen or one from the table. Then, you need to play at least one card from your hand. You can play one action card and one food card on your turn. Third, you need to discard a card. Then, the turn moves onto the next person.
You see, Takeout: The Card Game is all about creating a perfect plate of food. You want your plate to have a cold item, a spicy item, a buttery item, a salty item, a sour item and a sweet item. Some foods have more than one category assigned to them, which makes them more powerful as you just need a plate that has some of it all. When it comes to building your plate, however, your fellow players might be messing you up.
There are plenty of action cards mixed within this little deck. These allow you to steal dishes from other player’s plates, trade dishes with them, or even take one of their cards and place them into the bottom of the kitchen pile. This makes plates ever changing and guarantee that your scoring zone is constantly being watched.
Often, in Takeout: the Card Game, you will find yourself without any cards in your hand. Luckily for you, the game is aware of this, and has some special rules. If you start your turn without any cards in your hand, you are able to draw a card for yourself from the kitchen and give a card to everyone else at the table, then start your turn, so you always have at least two cards to work from. If you don’t have any cards when it’s at the discard phase of your turn then nothing happens, and you can just continue without penalty.
I quite enjoyed my time with Takeout: The Card Game. It’s a great, portable, little game with plenty of action cards, a good amount of ‘dud’ food cards that have no actual use to them, and there is a lot of stealing that can happen. The food itself looks really fun to eat, and the design is quite nice all together! It’s a game that also does work well for two players, which is useful!
You can order Takeout: The Card Game on The Game Crafter.
Love board games? Check out our list of the top board games we’ve reviewed.
