Review Summary: Who can eat spaghetti with one single bare hand?
Blurb from the publisher: 'Play with your food!
Recipe for delicious fun:
1.Prepare tangled colorful spaghetti with meatballs on the plate.
2.Try to pull out the most delicious noodles using one hand. You have only 20 seconds!
3.Watch out for meatballs rolling away! Did something fall off the plate? Then your turn is over!
Still hungry for excitement? Taste the unique Italian recipes!'
What you get: Your USD 35 or equivalent will buy you Spaghetti, a light-hearted, family-oriented dexterity game that accommodates two to four players in around thirty minutes. In addition to the cookbook, sorry, the rulebook in English, French, Spanish Itailan, Portuguese and German, the game also contains the following: 27 Entangled Spaghetti Noodles (10 natural, 8 tomato, 6 spinach, 3 sepia) [in reality four types of shoe laces in different colours), 4 Escaping Meatballs [ping pong balls], 2 Stylish Plates (one small and one large) [two cardboard plates at 20 and 23 cm respectively], 12 Unique Italian Recipes [tokens] and a time-pressure [a sand clock].
Those who received the game in Essen Spiel 2016 were also given an extra blue noodle with one additional Recipe.
Gameplay: This light dexterity game has a very simple objective: have the most points when all the food on the plate runs out.
Depending on the difficulty level, the small or the big paper plate will be used. Mix the shoe laces without tying them and place three or four ping pong balls on top of them. On his turn a player will have twenty seconds to remove the shoe laces, one by one, scoring points depending on their length. This should be however done with one hand only, and touching the spaghetti at one place only. No other items or appendages may be used. The lengthier a spaghetti/shoe lace is, the more points he receives (e.g. one point for normal, 2 for the tomato noodles etc). If at any given time a noodle touches the table outside the plate, his round is over. The ping pong balls can only be taken when they do not touch any of the shoe laces in the plate. They may be moving when picked up, but again, if they fall outside the plate the turn is over.
A more 'complicated' variant provides for recipes. Each recipe describes a number of ingredients, from two to four. As an example, the Napoletana requires two normal noodles (yellow, short shoe laces) and one spinach noodle (green, second-longest shoe lace). A player has to get them all ingredients out in the same 20-second round, in order to claim the points that the Recipe provides (in this example, 3).
That's pretty much it!
The strong points: Cute, fun, light, entertaining! The rules take 20 seconds to explain, while setup takes another 10. Within half a minute you will be ready to play.
The presentation of the game is spot-on. From the thick cardboard plates with two very traditional Italian designs, to the brown-coloured ping pong balls resembing the meatballs, everything is exquisitely done. The game plays very fast and is full of tension; in fact, the gameplay is so simple in its conception that I am wondering how come nobody ever thought of this before. Twenty seconds isn't that much of a time, and keeping an eye on both the spaghetti and the sand timer can be tricky. Needless to day, unless you are playing with really young kids you will only be using the 'harder' variant.
Seeing how the game does not demand any deep analytical thinking, it works fantastically with families and people who wouldn't touch gaming even with a 10-foot pole. Prepare to be plastered by your dexterous kids; honestly, you have no advantage over them. On the other hand, Spaghetti is also a great game for adults, especially those of the slightly intoxicated type that enjoy a friendly wager. I know this isn't how the company promotes the game. How else do you believe I could have playtested it ?
The game states that it lasts 30 minutes, and that's patently bull. A full game will effectively last less than 5 minutes, allowing you to play another one and a third one... and that will be around time to move to something heavier for the night, or pass it on to the kids in the room.
Inexplicably enough, the game pertains to be good for children above the age of six. Unless your children are maniacs who use shoe laces in disturbingly dangerous ways, the way I see it Spaghetti can be played by children from the age of four, provided they are mature enough to sit around the table without causing havoc.
The weak points: Spaghetti is a light dexterity game. You can stall a few seconds before the timer starts ticking in order to see what you will go for first, but let's not make it a bigger deal than it is.
Meeting to play Spaghetti: highly unlikely. Playing it in-between hardcore, demanding games, to lighten the mood: extremely likely.
I gaped when I saw the game going for USD 35. This is an exorbitant price for these components and gameplay. Frankly, it should be half of that, if not less.
I wish the game could have accommodated more four players. It can't, for obvious reasons: there isn't enough material on the plate for the dexterity challenge to be appropriate to everybody while the plate gets progressively emptier. If you are more you can easily take turns, seeing how a game can finish in less than 5 minutes.
If any Italian complains about how meatballs and spaghetti don't go together, or how the recipes are not real, get a life. You might as well complain about how the spaghetti/shoe laces are not long enough to be used in shoes. Funnily enough, some of them might be.
Conclusion: Spaghetti carries the day due its extremely clever gimmicks (laces for spaghetti, ping pong balls for meatballs) and hilariously obvious gameplay. Find it cheap and buy it now.
For more info on Spaghetti and Granna visit its website at http://www.granna.pl.
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