Review of Ristorante Italia

Blurb from the publisher: 'Cooking while playing has never been so easy... or fun!

In the advanced game, you expand your restaurant with new rooms to welcome more customers! You buy improvements to enhance your restaurant: a fantastic aquarium could make all the difference! You hire new staff: a good housewife might add a unique homedade flavor to your dishes. You refine your cooking abilities, by adding that 'personal touch' to your recipes. If you aren't quite up-to-date, take a cooking course to get back to the limelight and see if you can win the Great National Cooking Contest again!'

What you get: Your EUR 35 or equivalent will buy you a copy of Ristorante Italia, a set collection game for two to five players that lasts just under two hours irrespective of the mode you decide to play it in.

The box contains the rulebook in English, as well as the following items: one Market Board, one Bonus board, 5 Restaurant boards, 5 Ingredient crates, 150 Ingredient tokens, 4 VIP tokens, 4 Golden Spoon tokens, 3 Cookbook tokens, 5 Star tokens, 15 Specialty tokens, 93 coins, 5 plastic cups, 6 plastic Chef Hats, 30 Starter cards, 30 First Course cards, 30 Seconds Course cards, 18 Dessert cards, 40 Wine cards, 28 Bonus cards, 17 Special Touch cubes, and 11 Dining Room tiles. The box also contains a unique code to access the online cookbook which includes all the recipes in the game.

Gameplay: You always wanted to run an Italian restaurant, didn't you? Ristorante Italia makes your dream come true. You might even win the Great National Cooking Tournament, which might help you win the game. The objective is to collect the most points by doing a variety of things like obtaining stars for your restaurant, improving your position on the cook-o-meter, obtaining Golden Spoons, becoming an expert in a food category or specialty category, and let me not forget the bonus points you get for matching food to the right wines.

Each player starts with a restaurant, his scoring point on 10 of the cook-o-meter, and 25 money, which he keeps face down in his... cup. The game is played in four seasons, each of which is broken into three Action Rounds and three Scoring Rounds.

In an Action round, players play one after the other and perform two actions from the following two: Draw a new recipe card or a wine card, and Go Shopping. The actions can be taken in any order; the same action can be chosen twice. The same process is repeated three times (i.e. players will have taken six actions each) before the Scoring rounds begin. The first action allows the player to obtain a recipe or a wine in a semi-random fashion. There are limitations on the amount of recipes or wines a player can offer in his restaurant per type of food (starters, first courses, second courses, dessert). Shopping on the other hand is how the player collects ingredients, after paying their cost in coins. There are five sellers: the butcher, the fishmonger, the greengrocer, the fruit shop lady and the general store owner. Items are always replenished after purchase. A player can also choose to restock a merchant, by throwing all his current wares to the garbage bin and have him reorder (what a waste of good material).

The three Scoring Rounds are the Critic's, the VIP's, and the Revenue round. During the first players can add Recipes from their hands to their menus by matching the materials on the card. The points value of the new Recipes that were added this round is counted; the players with the two highest sums will see their position in the cook-o-meter improve significantly, even though at the end of the day everybody will improve, if even a bit. During the VIP round players will secretly decide how much money they wish to spend on advertising. When bids are revealed the winner will pay all the money he bid, as well as earn a Star and the VIP token. The others players still have to pay half their money. Adds aren't free. The Revenue round earns money for your restaurant, by adding up the values of all the receipts and wines, irrespective of whether they were obtained in this round or not.

The last scoring rounds (the ones after season four) play slightly differently. There is now a Taste Guide Round, the VIP round and the Economy Prize. The first revolves around creating a full menu (one starter, one first course, one second course and one dessert) that has the highest critics score. There are additional bonuses if other requirements are met, like foods falling in the same food category or the Restaurant Specialty. The VIP round is identical to the VIP rounds in the previous seasons, while in the Economy Prize players count their money. The one with the most money receives an extra star.

The game closes with the Grand National Cooking Tournament where the recipes with the most Prestige points are compared. Players thus gain Golden Spoons, which translate into points when the final scoring takes place.

These, however, are only the basic rules. The advanced rules add Special Actions to a the players' arsenal. There are Getting a Special Touch Cube, Buying a Bonus card, Building a Dining Room and Taking a Cooking class. Special Touch cubes provide bonuses in the critic round, the Taste Guide Round and the National Cooking Tournament. Bonus cards are exceptional cards with a unique effect, which are purchased from a selection of face-up cards. In other words, you know what you are buying. Dining Rooms produce both income and Prestige at the end of the game. Cooking classes on the other hand improve a chef's position in the cook-o-meter.

If one wants even more options, the game provides three variants relating on how to use Wine, the player order and a new action called Apprentice action which counts as two and allows you to shop directly from a crate, for those times when you'd sell your soul to obtain this single particular ingredient that appears to have disappeared.

The strong points: Ristorante Italia is an Italian product. It is not thus that surprising that the theme goes to eleven and higher. Every time I am taking this game out I semi-instantly get hungry. From the little crates that hold the fresh produce your recipes will use to the measuring cups where you keep your money, the tablecloth designs reminiscent of a family-owned small-time trattoria in a real Italian village (as opposed to a real Italian tourist trap), the plastic chef hats and the homely tokens, everything is designed around the words 'cute', 'sweet' and 'lovely'. Restaurants are colour coded 'Al Gatto Nero', 'Al Grande Blu' etc, with comedic art and nice little designs. That's all excellent.

The game however is not carried by its designs, but by its gameplay. It is not innovative; every bit and piece has been seen here or there before. The mechanics however mash up well, and provide a sum that is bigger than its parts. The basic game can be a good introduction for younger adults, it is not however something gamers would feel particularly attracted to, seeing how it takes more time to play than others games in its category. The advanced game provides more options, with more choices to make and more things to consider, while keeping the tension high up to the very end. I strongly recommend that you use them from your very first game, unless you have adolescents on the table and you want to excite them about the overall genre of resource management games. The game requires adaptability, seeing how the materials you have in mind for your creations might be grabbed by another player before you. Planning will also help you win the day; these recipes should better have some things in common to gain extra points. It is not easy to gauge who is winning until the very end, thanks to the many ways to collect points. Keep your eyes open and adjust your tactics.

I enjoyed how the last round plays differently to the previous ones, since it's an excellent mixture of theme and gameplay. The 'Gara Nazionale di Cucina' is important business, and you'd better have everything ready before that.

I always like the gesture from the publishers who include resealable bags to store the game's components once you punch them from their cardboards. Ristorante Italia continues the good practice. I wish everybody did it.

The weak points: Player interaction is low irrespective of game mode. Friendly as this might be (you don't see restaurant owners beating up one another in the streets, do you?), it does feel like a multiplayer solitaire at all times with the exception of the bidding phase. Depending on what your requirements are from a game, you might feel that Ristorante Italia lasts too long for the level of confrontational involvement that it provides.

The game could have used some extra fine-tuning. I have no trouble with the different mechanics it uses, non-gamers however might find them a bit too much for a game that is aimed squarely towards the middle ground. Take scoring as an example. There are seven different ways to earn points in the basic game alone. This would have been commendable in other games, yet it feels like too much here.

I very strongly recommend that you use the Wine variant from your very first game, limiting the amount of income that players will potentially earn. As the game stands, money is practically falling from the sky. A game with purchasing requirements where nobody feels any pressure or the need to use money cleverly kind of beats the point.

The English translation could have been better done. For a game of such weight, it uses at times too many words and makes things appear needlessly complicated. There are also a handful of Italianisms around. One can still understand and enjoy the game, yet I would have liked to do this with less soul (and internet) searching.

You'd better have a big table for this. That's how things are: the more complicated a recipe, the more space you need to prepare it.

As much as I tried to access the online cookbook, that was impossible due to the page being down. I admit I am more disappointed than I thought I would have been.

Conclusion: Ristorante Italia readily finds its place as a game of moderate difficulty for what non-gamers will perceive as social gaming with high demands. Gamers on the other hand will experience a cute theme with solid ideas. In that sense, it's identical to food. Not everybody likes the same, and if they do, they do so for different reasons. That's the tell-tale sign of a good chef.

To find out more about Ristorante Italia take a look at www.redglove.eu.

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