Crumbs! The Sandwich Filler Game - Kickstarter Preview - Minerva Games

 

The best things come in small packages, and normally, so does poison. As someone who has a spectacular intolerance to most things which started with gluten, you can understand from my point of view that when a designer sends me a game why revolves specifically the customisation and creation of sandwiches instantly starts at a negative point and has to crawl itself out of a hole to even start at zero. 

Overview

Crumbs! The Sandwich Filler Game is all about hand and resource management where you are taking actions to play cards in stacks in order to create sandwiches and fulfil orders, keep customers happy and score points. 

Mainplay

You'll start with a couple of order cards that detail a couple of customers and the type of sandwiches they want, including different bread and fillings and whether customer customer wants some of the bread toasted. On your turn you can play one ingredient type in the preparation area, so any kind of bread, or salad, salmon or even some ham. You can flip over bread to toast them, or rescue a single ingredient from the pantry. You can take up to five actions in a turn, and as long as you manage to create a sandwich even if it is part of an order, then you get to reset your actions and play again. Any sandwich you create have their ingredients returned the the pantry and you're allowed to rescue one kind of ingredient at this point. Finish both customer's orders on a card and you'll get the points value of that card. Finish three order cards and the game finishes and you count up the final scores. If you fancy double the fun, then a second player can join in to increase the tension behind the counter. There will be loud words and sweating brows as lunch time takes hold. 

Winning 

Final scoring is based on the points total of the order cards you fulfil. You can use different customer order cards to increase the difficulty as well. The harder order cards requiring more sandwiches to be made with different ingredients. 

Looks 

Rory Muldoon knocking it out of the park with a crusty baguette on this one. The card art is clear, crisp and lettuce fresh and as you construct the decks, you'll be forgiven if you start to have some kind of Pavlovian reaction to the cardboard lunches that you are creating.  

Learning  

I think the small booklet you learn the game from does an okay job of teaching the rules with a few things I had to read over a couple of times to fully understand as they could be interpreted in a couple of ways that quite literally changed how the game played in terms of assembly. Apart from that there are some illustrated examples in the rules that you can follow and I appreciate that over a full wall of text instead. 

Timing 

Crumbs is a filler, a game that is either going t be a quick ten minutes or a longer half hour if you are just taking your time and sitting back, organising you layout to try to maximise your order potential. 

Final Thoughts

As we continue to see games where excess is more prevalent, where boxes are literal building blocks and stories require months of dedication, its always interesting to see a game where constraints have dictated the design. Crumbs is an exercise in squeezing as much gameplay as they can out of a box that would rattle around and potentially be lost within other normal sized boxes. It is a lesson in efficiency, planning and timing, where your choice of when you play ingredients will dictate whether you have enough to complete one sandwich or a whole order. Sometimes you'll spend a minute simply planning out the five actions that you are about to take before you even pick an ingredient to place in your preparation area. Often you'll fail after a flourish of orders when you realise that your restock action was far too late to allow you to continue. Unsurprisingly Crumbs is perfectly suited to sitting down over a lunch time while you wait for your lunch to be prepared while you in turn try to keep your own group of customers satisfied. Due to the fact that the orders have ingredients on the reverse side of the card, the customers that you end up playing to serve will have a direct effect on the available resources. The artwork is wonderfully pure and straight forward, with a graphic design that really works to support the theme, so when the game is one the table, you really feel you are creating lunches. A worthwhile way to spend fifteen minutes challenging your brain while not having to concern yourself with carbs or gluten. Minerva and J. Antscherl are serving up lunch, and it's a bit tasty. 

Any Tips? 

It's important to target the sandwiches that use the same ingredient so you can return as many back from the pantry when you do that action. 

This preview is based on the prototype version of the game provided to us by the designer and publisher. We were not paid for this preview. We give a general overview of the gameplay and so not all of the mechanical aspects of the game may be mentioned. Quotations from this preview may possibly appear in relation to any marketing associated with this game. 

The majority of the games that we are play are going to take a reasonable number of sessions and playthroughs to fully understand every possibility that they offer. We hope this write up gives you an idea of whether or not this game is something that you will consider playing or even add to your collection. Our Six Degrees of Expectation have been written to make it easier for you to find out what is important to you as a player. Even if we don't like something, hopefully it helps you to decide if it is something that you should find out more about. We always suggest you check out a gameplay video to give you a better understanding of the game as it is played. 

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