Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
I love dice games. There’s just something about the feel of grabbing a handful of dice and chucking them across the table. Sure you’ve got to deal with lady luck, but that’s okay for the right game. And 2012’s press your luck dice game Sausage Sizzle, a game from Inka and Markus Brand re-released this year by 25th Century Games, might just be one of those games. Note that in Australia, a “sausage sizzle” is a community barbecue focused on sausages. You learn something new every day, right?
Light on theme, but heavy on fun, Sausage Sizzle has players rolling dice in order to score points for each of 6 Australian animals (echidnas, snakes, crocodiles, kangaroos, quokkas, and platypus).
The game plays out over 6 rounds, which correspond to the number of animals. Each round you’ll be scoring one animal, indicated by the 6 animal scoring tokens that each player has in front of them. On your turn roll all eight dice (4 with numbers 2-5 and a sausage, and 4 with animals), and keep at least 1. After you’ve set aside all 8 dice, you score. But what, dear reader, are you scoring for?
Sausage Sizzle scoring is all about multipliers. You’ll multiply the value of the lowest number die times your selected animal. If you have all 5s on your numbered dice, and 2 kangaroos, then you’ll score 10 points, and flip the kangaroo over. If however your lowest number is 2, then you’ll score 4 points (2 times 2 kangaroos). But remember when I mentioned sausages? If you’re lucky enough to get all 4 sausages then you’ll multiply your animals times 7…but if you don’t have all 4 sausages, then your lowest number is a 1.
This is one of those games where you’ll likely wind up cursing the dice for being uncooperative for you, even as you cheer their bad behavior for your opponents. Early in Sausage Sizzle the field is wide open and you can score just about anything, but as you flip over animal tokens (making them unavailable) your choices become more and more limited. In the last round, you’ll be happy to squeak by with 3 or 4 points.
There’s not much more to say about Sausage Sizzle. It’s a fun, simple press your luck dice game, featuring delightful art by none other than Ian O’Toole, that lasts about 15 minutes; any more and it would certainly outlast its welcome. The box is small and the contents are even smaller, so you could easily play this on the go, perhaps even while ”throwing a shrimp on the barbie”?
Sausage Sizzle! details
- Designer: Inka Brand, Markus Brand
- Artists: Franziskus Wittmann, Ian O'Toole, Renato Faccini
- Publishers: 25th Century Games, Adoleta Jogos, KOSMOS
- Release Date: 2012
- Player count : 2 - 5
- Age range : 8+
- Time range : 15 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Dice Rolling, Re-rolling and Locking, Set Collection
- BGG Geek Rating: 6.49656 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.0.
- More articles about Sausage Sizzle!.
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