| 👨👩👧👦 | Players: 2-5 |
| ⏳ | Time: 30 mins |
| 🎂 | Ages: 14+ |
| ⚙️ | Mechanisms: Hand Management, Card Counting, Luck |
Every so often we play a game and instantly fall in love with it, like we did with Mamma Mia.
Designed by Uwe Rosenberg and published by Rio Grande Games, it’s a small box card game for two to five players where you take on the role of a pizza chef trying to complete as many of your orders as you can over the course of the game.
Each turn you add ingredient cards from your hand to the oven, and once you think you’ve got the right ones in there you can add your order to the pile to be made. Sounds easy, but there’s a big problem – there’s only one oven and everyone is trying to make their orders at the same time. There’s no time to waste though, so just throw stuff in and hope for the best!
At the end of each round you empty the oven, one ingredient at a time, and any time an order card shows up you check if there are enough ingredients on the table to make it. If there are, you discard all of those cards and put your order into your scoring pile. If there wasn’t, either because you miscounted or someone else’s order took what you needed, tough luck!
At two players, you can kind of keep track of which ingredients and orders have been placed and be a little bit strategic in your moves, but the more players you have the harder that gets. We played at four for the first time the other day and everyone had a blast. It was a little bit chaotic but that only added to the experience. You should have heard the cheers (and occasional groans) during scoring!
Mamma Mia is just plain, cheesy fun. It’s a combination of memory, timing and luck, and somehow just works. It’s not going to win any beauty pageants, but whatever it lacks in visual appeal it more than makes up for in gameplay.
You can see this post on Instagram here and if you are interested you can find out more about the game on the Rio Grande Games website!
The copy of Mamma Mia used for this review was provided to A Tale of Two Meeples by Rio Grande Games
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