Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes

The Components

Restaurant Row comes in a cardboard manuscript box with a set of self-produced components:

The Menu: The board for Restaurant Row is laid out in a three-fold restaurant menu, which is a very elegant & colorful element. The menu is two-sided with three-panels on the front laying out the board for 3 or 4 players and two-panels on the back laying out the board for 2 players. I'd guess the printing is all done on a color inkjet, but the result looks quite attractive.

The actual contents of the board include: a map for each of 4 restaurants, spaces for various goods, and a variety of action tracks. There's also some good information laid out on the menu, including order of play and reminders of various costs.

The Dry-Erase Marker: One of the clever things about using a menu for a board is that you can write on it with a dry-erase marker, then later scrub the writing off. And, Restaurant Row takes advantage of that, allowing you to track customer numbers and cumulative popularity and food values by marking the menu with the supplied dry-erase marker.

Wooden Markers: The game comes complete with ~40 wooden discs and ~40 wooden squares. When you first get the game you'll need to apply stickers to each of these pieces, to create your sets of employees (squares), customers (squares), ingredients (discs), renovations (discs), word of mouth markers (discs), and $50 tokens (discs).

The result allows for the nice heft of wooden pieces combined with the addition information provided by the stickers. Unfortunately the printing on the stickers doesn't hold up as well as the board; a lot of it seems pixelated.

You also get a wooden first-player marker.

Bags: You'll be drawing tiles over the course of the game. Two cloth bags are supplied for the tokens that you'll be drawing the most: ingredients and customers.

There's clearly been a lot of effort expended to help you draw the right tokens. Not only are the two sets different shapes (as noted above), but the bags are also of different weaves.

(I still got the bags mixed up more than once.)

Plastic Coins: Small plastic Poker chips in red, white, and blue.

Quick Reference Card: Each player gets a cardstock sheet showing him the special employees and renovations where are possible. Theoretically, you can use this as a screen to hide your coins too, but I don't find that very practical based on the shape on the sheets (which are tall and non-angled).

Dice: Four six-sided dice and one four-sided dice, all plastic and printed with numerals.

Restaurant Row is a self-published game, and the components reflect that. They may lack polish and some beauty at times, but they do all seem very sturdy and there's also been some good effort put into component utility. I also really adore the menu/board, as I've already noted.

As a self-published game, I've given Restaurant Row a high "3" out of "5" for Style: slightly above average.

The Gameplay

The public is fickle! The object of Restaurant Row is to produce the "best" restaurant--but what constitutes best can change over time.

Setup: Each player gets one restaurant and $25 to stack. The customer track is initially set at 10. The Word of Mouth Track is randomized.

The Customer Track. From turn-to-turn, the total number of customers visiting restaurant row will increase, slowly pushing the game toward its end.

Word of Mouth. Word of Mouth is how the game will ultimately be scored. It features six possibilities: ambiance, food, popularity, profit, rating, and service. They're initially set randomly, and then will change over the course of the game.

Order of Play: The game is played over a series of rounds, each of which includes the following phases:

• Stock Resources
• Visit Stores
• Set Prices
• Seat and Serve Customers
• Adjust Restaurant Values
• Collect Money & Pay Staff
• Pay Interest & Loans
• Lay Off Staff
• Reset Board

Stock Resources: Each round a random number of ingredients are put out, separated among three types: meat, seafood, and veggies. In addition new tiles are put out for employees and renovations, to fill those stores.

Visit Stores: Players now get to take three actions, one at a time. For each of these action rounds, the players all simultaneously select an action, then reveal. The possibilities are:

• Fish Market. Buy seafood.
• Butcher Shop. Buy meat.
• Farmer's Market. Buy veggies.
• Help Wanted. Hire an employee.
• Renovations. Buy a renovation.
• Bank. Take out a loan.

The first three markets give you food items to lay out your "specials of the day", which help attract "foodie" customers. The Help Wanted store gives you an employee who will increase your service rating and also give you some special ability. The renovations store lets you increase your ambiance, and sometimes give you special abilities too. The bank just gives you cash.

The first five stores all have items that cost money. If you're the only one at the store you pay and get what you want. If multiple people choose the same action, however, an auction occurs. One player puts item(s) up for bid, and then players must bid at least the minimum value of the items. The highest bidder wins and the other bidder(s) get to choose from what's left.

(There's no competition at the bank; they have plenty of money and, fictionally, are happy to give it to small businesses.)

Set Prices: Now each player secretly sets the price of his meals from $5-15. The upper price is limited by how many stars a restaurant has in its rating.

Seat & Serve Customers: Here's where the fun occurs. Customers are randomly drawn from a bag and they go to one of the restaurants depending on their personal preferences. Cheapskates go for low-priced food, executives look for ambiance, locals look for service, foodies look for good quality food (usually in a specific category), tourists look for the restaurants with the best ratings, and scenesters go to whatever has the most people already.

There's some complexity in all of this. To start with, all customer types have second and third preferences, in case of ties. In addition certain renovations and employees can help you grab certain types of customers. For example, the bar tender always grabs the first local, no matter who has the best service.

The Shill & The Critic. There are two special customers: the shill and the critic. The shill may be randomly drawn and the critic always is drawn as the tenth customer.

The shill increases your restaurant's rating by 1 to a maximum of 4, but doesn't pay for his dinner.

The critic resets your current rating. He bases a new rating upon ambiance, service, and food quality. The result is a number from 1-5.

Adjust Restaurant Values: A few other values change at the end of each customer round.

The restaurant that filled first adjusts the Word of Mouth values. Then it and the restaurant that closed second both increase their cumulative popularity value.

The two restaurants with the best food similarly increase their cumulative food value.

Word of Mouth. The word of mouth scale is easy to change. Each type of customer has an associated victory condition. For example, the Word of Mouth victory condition for executives is ambiance--the exact thing that attracts them.

When the first restaurant fills, you look at all the customer types in that restaurant, and each of their victory conditions increases by one. The result is (more or less) that the most popular restaurants over the course of the game will set the final victory conditions for the game.

Collect Money & Pay Staff: You now earn the cost you set for your meals times your number of diners. You also have to pay $5-20 depending on how many staff you have (if any).

Pay Interest & Loans: You must pay $1 on each $10 loan; you can then pay back loans.

Lay Off Staff: If you don't like staff, you can discard them.

Reset Board: You now clear all customers and all ingredients. You get to hold on to your employees and renovations.

Ending the Game: The game ends after: all restaurants fill during a turn; the last renovation is put out; or the last employee is put out. You then look at the final Word of Mouth ratings, which determine final victory points.

Each Word of Mouth has three victory-point listings for the players who did first, second, and third best in that category. For example, if popularity were first, the player with the best cumulative popularity scores 10 points, the one with the second best scores 6, and the one with the third best scores 3. Other categories would earn fewer points.

You total up all the points from Word of Mouth and the player with the best score wins.

Relationships to Other Games

Greg Lam has previously been a designer of more abstract games. This is his first Eurodesign.

It's a resource management game with auctions and in my opinion with quite a few simulation elements as well. It generally offers a pretty unique take on the Euro-elements that it builds upon.

The Game Design

Restaurant Row is a game with both highs and lows. I find the result a bit mixed, but toward the good side of things.

To start off with, it's got a good premise and a number of systems that work together well to support it. The simultaneous-action-selection allows for interesting choices and the auction supports it decently well.

The game is set up so that there are considerable paths to victory … provided that the Word of Mouth comes out well for you. But even absent whether you're going for ambience, popularity, great food, or any of the other possibilities, you also can make interesting choices among employees and renovations: do you choose ones that offer general benefits to your business, or do you just concentrate on getting more people in the door?

There were three elements in the game that I found particularly intriguing.

First is the Word of Mouth chart. Having the victory points be variable and having them change based on who's doing well at any time is pretty innovative.

Second is an element that I didn't mention in my overview of the game: the first-player marker. Rather uniquely it moves from one player to another only when someone gets a benefit from the first-player marker. That's a pretty neat concept for any game where the benefits of going first aren't clearly segregated among turns.

Third is the method by which the customers arrive in restaurants. Somehow it seems balanced just right, offering up variety between those various paths to victory that I already mentioned. It's pretty cool to see it come out differently on different turns, based on who was drawn and in what order.

However, I also felt like a number of the systems of the game were sufficiently unpolished that they didn't always work right.

Take the Word of Mouth chart as an example. I loved the concept but not the execution, which I felt had two problems. First, you'd often have 3-4 different categories of diners in your restaurant when you filled up. That meant that most of the chart would change every turn. Second, if you had a group of adjacent categories which all improved, the first in the group would end up sliding behind everything else. More than once in the game, a Word of Mouth started off in order 1,2,3,4,5,6 and then because categories 1-4 all showed improvement, the end result was 2,3,4,1,5,6.

There were other minor problems. I felt like some of the employees were unbalanced while other players thought the same of some renovations. I felt like the ability to throw out food you didn't want could result in degenerate gameplay, as the food was cheap enough that buying it all up and throwing the rest away didn't necessarily do you any harm. I also felt like a runaway leader could be a big problem.

Finally, I didn't like how the end game was laid out. The d4 was rolled each turn to increase the number of customers, leading to increased numbers of people that would eventually fill the restaurants. If it continuously rolled low, then a game could go on for dramatically long. At the same time the other end game conditions (renovations and employees) could sometimes be stalled by a single player if everyone else had already filled their restaurant.

So, if I put it all together, I'd say: a solid basis, some neat ideas, and a variety of small flaws. On average I still think that Restaurant Row is an interesting game that players will enjoy, though I'd point casual gameplayers to it more than serious gamers. I've given it a high "3" out of "5" for Substance, slightly above average.

Conclusion

Restaurant Row is a SimRestaurant sort of game with Euro-mechanics that sometimes aren't as clean and polished as you'd like, but which still result in an interesting, casual game.