Good Taste

Every so often, a board game tries to capture some of the flavor of a different kind of game. Years ago, I wrote about Potion Explosion, which was a kinda-sorta take on Candy Crush. Now I've come upon Tasty Humans, by designer Ryan Langewisch -- a game that's kinda-sorta Tetris.

Each player takes on the role of a ravenous monster marauding through a medieval village. With each turn, you eat one of the townsfolk, placing them in your gradually-filling stomach. Each villager arrives at your mouth as a pattern of body part tokens, which you must then "drop" into a column of your grid-ordered stomach. They settle to the bottom -- in a way that, if you've done your planning right, maximizes points for your particular set of scoring conditions.

There are plenty of "polyomino" games about arranging interestingly-shaped pieces on a game board; it's not the shapes alone that make a game feel like Tetris. But having them "fall into place" as they do here definitely evokes that feeling. There's a lot more to it, to be sure. The shape of the villager doesn't land "intact" -- it's an arrangement of single squares that will collapse at the bottom of your stomach into the most compact form possible. You're also not simply trying to fill up horizontal lines.

In fact, scoring is the most complicated aspect of the game. In each round, players draft multiple villagers for their stomach. They then draft one of an array of scoring tiles, each with their own scoring condition. One might look for "hands" in an unbroken orthogonal line connecting to the scoring tile itself. Another might look to score for any "leg" anywhere in your stomach that's touching another leg. Drafting for compatible goals is a big part of the strategy... but the players who need help most get to draft first. If you're already doing well, you're likely to get saddled with a difficult new scoring condition to try to work toward next round.

There is, however, a wrinkle to placing these scoring tokens that I think the game could do without. When you choose one, you don't place it in your stomach immediately. Instead, it waits off to the side and gets put in at the end of the next round, just before you select your next goal. Basically, you spend one round preparing for the scoring goal you have "on deck," then drop it in. Perhaps this would grow to seem more natural with repeated plays, but it caused a lot of friction within my group -- with almost everyone, at least once, confused about when a goal would be added to the stomach.

The drafting system for the villagers you eat, however, is a lot more smooth, and quite fun. Nine villager cards are arranged in a 3 x 3 grid. Some are helpless snacks for you to devour. Other are armed warriors that protect the villagers orthogonally adjacent to them in the grid -- if you select a protected villager, each of the protectors deals 1 damage to you: you must take a damage token and toss it into your stomach along with the villager you're eating. Archers in the grid protect villagers that are 2 cards away, also inflicting damage. These damage tokens take up space you'd rather fill with body parts, and each one costs you points at the end of the game if it's touching any other damage in your stomach. Eating turns out to be a tricky balance of whether to choose the most useful villagers (accepting the damage that may come with them), or to select less valuable villagers that cause you less damage.

Tasty Humans might be a touch more complex than it needs to be. On the other hand, it might be that very complexity that we would grow into and appreciate if we play it more. There's enough going on there that I could see doing that. I give it a B+.