Are you a fan of Futurama? YES! Great. No? Shame on you, it’s great. Don’t worry, though, this isn’t a Futurama game. Although I have a reason for asking. You see, Leela, a purple-haired cyclops member of the ensemble cast, is the child of sewer mutants. In Snack Time, you are guiding a set of sewer mutants as they evolve and feed on the delectable morsels that walk the surface above them. (Technically, they are sewer creatures but I plead artistic licence.)
Snack time is a pretty straightforward roll-and-write game. The game starts with five sewer entrances being added randomly to a 6×6 grid inside the full map area of the scoresheet. These correspond to five manhole cover cards in the centre of the table or playing area. Above those cards are a deck of facedown Pedestrian Cards, with one turned faceup above each manhole cover card. At the start of each turn, the fifth Pedestrian gets flipped over into a facedown discard pile, and the remaining Pedestrians continue walking down the street to the next sewer entrance, revealing a new Pedestrian Card at number one.
Someone –it doesn’t matter who– rolls the dice. All players will use these results for the round, in whatever way they want. First, there are two brown dice, which will indicate the placement of a Rat Snack somewhere in that same 6×6 grid where the entrances are located. Rat Snacks are, as the name would indicate, small snacks for your sewer creatures that add up to extra points at the end of the game. Next, there are two purple attribute dice, each with symbols for Eyes, Teeth, and Tentacles. Players assign the two rolled traits to whichever of their four creatures they want. These Attributes are what will determine if a creature can snack on any given pedestrian. Lastly, there are three cream dice with pipe segments on them: either an I, L, or T. Players add these pipe segments to their map connecting to either a creature, an entrance, or an existing pipe.
Once all of that is done, players look to see if their creatures are connected to any entrances and if that creature has the attributes needed to eat the pedestrian there. A creature needs to be able to match the two attributes on the Pedestrian Card and the adjacent attribute to the cards on either side of it. The backs of the cards have a different pair of attributes, which the pedestrians at entrances 1 and 5 will need to match.
You are probably telling yourself it can’t possibly be that easy. Well, it is, and it isn’t. Snacking on some pedestrians incurs a penalty. Some people fight back and do damage to your creatures. When this happens, you must cross out one trait space on every creature snacking on that pedestrian. Some people alert the authorities to the situation, and each creature crosses out a badge icon on their scoresheet. For every three badges crossed out, a player will lose 2 points at the end of the game, and the game ends at the end of the turn in which any play crosses out their ninth and final badge icon. Players may also encounter Traps in the sewers that will do additional damage and alert the authorities at a specific sewer entrance (but only once).
The end game is also triggered when any player has successfully fed all four of their creatures three snacks, or (optionally, for harder play) when any creature takes a fourth damage and dies.
Scoring isn’t overly complex: For each creature, add the number of snacks they ate, the total points from the snacks they ate, and the number of undamaged attributes they have filled in. Add the four creature totals, then add 1 point for every rat snack your sewer pipes encounter, and subtract any penalties from crossed out badges. The winner has the highest score, or if you are playing solo, there is a chart to see how well you played.
There are people out there who absolutely LOVE roll and write games. I’m lukewarm on them. They can be a nice change of pace, and the essentially unlimited player count can make for a neat large-gathering experience. But one of my biggest issues with the genre is that a company can include only a finite number of pages. Now, there are obvious ways around this. I know people who laminate a set of papers and play with erasable markers. For my livestream of the game, I encouraged my viewers to download copies of the blank map from the Backfire Game Studio website and use those. (They have several versions and I recommend the printer-friendly version, printed in greyscale.) Even with recycling spent paper and other options, most [blank and] write games just feel wasteful to me. To be clear, that’s a me thing. I’m not holding that opinion against Snack Time. Quite the opposite, in fact. If given the opportunity to play Snack Time again, I totally would. My positive opinion of the game outweighs my personal opinion of the genre as a whole. The game also includes a Baby Monster Expansion that adds a bit more variety to the gameplay. If you rescue a Baby Monster from the surface (in the same way you would eat a pedestrian) you get a token and a unique bonus.
You can find Backfire Game Studio online at backfiregames.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/backfiregamestudio.
By the way, you can print out the game sheets and play along with me on YouTube if you want!
