Board Game: GBBO

On your mark, get set, soggy bottom!

The Game: The Great British Baking Show Game
The Publisher: Ravensburger
Time: 20 minutes
Players: Me, Michelle, Gus, Amanda

Game Play: Much like the show, the game is played in three rounds. They're called Signature/Technical/Showstopper, but they're all played the same way, basically. You choose a theme (Cake, Pie, Dessert, etc.) which has three cards, one for each round to complete. And then each player gets a deck of cards that includes things like Bake, Filling, Icing, and Style. 

Here's my baker and my deck of teeny cards

On each round, you're trying to recreate the depiction of the bake on the round card, drawing one card at a time from your deck. You can put a card into your bake, but it has to touch another card there, meaning if you draw a card you need for the top and you haven't built that far yet, you can't use it. You can put cards in one of the three slots on your baker card, and you can take a card off the top of one of those instead of drawing from your deck, but you can't take a card out of a bake once it's there (exception: once per round you can ditch as many cards from your bake as you want and put them in the bin).

A bake in progress

When you're done, you grab the highest timer left in the center of the table, so in a four-player game the first player done gets the 5, the second gets the 3, and so on. Last one gets the 1, but once that's the only one left you have to stop and you can only add things to your bake that are face-up on your card (so if you're the last one done you're probably screwed). Completing the bake gets your points, and then there are "Great Bake" and "Hollywood Handshake" parameters that make the bake more restrictive. 

Behold the Swiss roll kind of thing

Opinions: They'll make licensed games out of anything (see also the Dallas RPG) and most of the time they suck, but this is actually a lot of fun. It manages to capture the frantic time management aspects of the show pretty well, and it's surprisingly easy to fuck up (I managed to get zero points in the first round because I forgot a layer in a very simple bake) if you rush, but it's also easy to come in last if you take too much time. Also, the "soggy" bake cards, which are usually a good way to not get anything higher than "Complete" in scoring, really look gross, which is hard to do given how simple the graphic design is. So kudos and "ew" to that.

About the only issue I have is that the game takes up more room than you'd think because you have to build your bake (which, as you can see, can get kind of elaborate) and leave room for your baker's card so you can put your cards in piles, but on my gaming table that's not generally a problem. 

Star Baker Gus!

 Keep? Yep.