I wouldn’t want to eat toenails!

Monster Café was Miss B’s Christmas present to me, so we were pretty keen to give it a go — although we had to play a bit more on other occasions before Miss B was happy to let me publish a post on it.

It’s a bit difficult to see what’s going on here, but basically the green cuddly monster (called Monsty) is looking after the lemon sorbets because he likes them.

The game is actually quite a lot like Coloretto. This, I think, is a good thing as Coloretto is one of my favourite games and one Miss B loves to play too. Basically you have cards representing tables with icky food on (the sort of thing monsters like to eat) and play monsters around the tables. At some point you can choose a table and take the meal and any monsters sitting there into your scoring pile, and sit out the rest of the round. Then you do it again a few times. At the end, you score points for monsters you have claimed if you also have some food they like, and negative points for monsters who have nothing to eat.

What stops this being just a themed up Coloretto clone (which, given the monster art and nice tin it comes in, would be fine anyway) is the element of chaos introduced by the dreaded lemon sorbets. Yup, monsters hate lemon sorbets and so, if you draw a card with one on, some of your monsters run away and you won’t score them. This isn’t always bad, but it makes for a lot of laughter when I manage to draw almost all of them, meaning that my score was pitiful.

We got on well with this game, enjoying the ickyness of some of the dishes being served. It’s clearly not Miss B’s favourite, but it’s another good offering from Gamewright that’ll stay on the shelf in the living room where we keep our selection of casual play games that are played most often.

Just for reference, though, Miss B is not sure she wants to give detailed verdicts for the time being, so until further notice she will just be rating games out of 10. Seems fair to me.

The verdict from Miss B (aged 7): “I’d give it an 8 out of 10.”

The game: Monster Café (Gamewright), 2 to 4 players aged 8+.