Quick Peaks – Umami, Etherstone, Attack!, Millennia: Tracks of Time, Neko Syndicate,

Umami - Justin Bell

I keep trying HeidelBÄR games released by Czech Games Edition, and I keep coming up short. Umami, the latest in a line of family-friendly, light “take that” card games featuring cute art, is designed by a person of relative weight in the tabletop space: Don Eskridge, the man behind The Resistance and Quest. That was enough to at least raise my hand to try out Umami…but there’s strangely not much game here.

Players use ingredient cards from their hand and from a four-card market to build dishes that will then be fulfilled by public contracts known here as “Favorites.” Each turn, a player will play one card from hand then add one card from the market to build out as many as five dishes in their tableau. As soon as a Favorite condition is met, the player takes that card and can hold it as long as no one else tries to steal it by making a more favorable version of the Favorite’s fulfillment condition. The game’s ingredient cards have values from 1-9, and this factors into whether a player can steal a Favorite card by outperforming it and stealing it later.

I teed up Umami with my two kids, and we were surprised to find that stealing a…

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