Players: 2-6
Age: 8+
Duration: +- 15 minutes
Distributor: Jumping Turtle Games
Wurst Case Scenario – Board Game Review
It’s sometimes hard to come up with new ideas for games or board games in particular. Many games either base themselves on books, series or videogames, and make a board game around the world of those items, adding base mechanics of the game it was based on, or the story of the novel, and so on. Sometimes, however, we get something brand new on the horizon, and this creates games like Wurst Case Scenario, a game about sentient sausages having to escape the clutches of the meat grinder. We fought our sausage-eating habits and this time we fought for the survival for our designated sausage(s).
Contents
- Rules
- 8 identity cards
- 8 conveyor belt cards
- 1 meat grinder card
- 38 action cards
- 8 sausages (+ plastic stands)
- 6 chips (Banana, Power, Jam)
- 1 starting player marker
- 3 overview cards
As the game’s ‘board’ and everything around it is made out of cards, or thick cardboard materials for the characters and chips, you can imagine that the contents aren’t overly impressive in terms of materials used. The artwork on the cards and the character design is, however, very appealing and witty. You’ll have interesting looking characters, nice looking action cards and the scary conveyor belt that will be the last thing the sausages will ever see. Overall, for its price range, the package comes with quality materials. We only found it annoying that the plastic stands were already pinched together, making it hard to insert the thick character cardboard cards, sometimes damaging them in the process. We reckon the stands were pinched closed, making sure they have a proper grip on the character cards.
Mechanics
Wurst Case Scenario pits eight sausages against one another, fighting to be the last sausage standing by trying to avoid the meat processor at the end of a moving conveyor belt. When playing with one to four players, you’ll have two sausages assigned to you, if you play with more than four players, you’ll only get one identity. Your dealt personas will be a secret for the rest of the players, which means you can try and trick them by making them believe you’re one of the other players’ sausages, or in case of only one to three players, one of the dummy sausages who have nobody assigned to them.
The concept and mechanics of the game are actually extremely simple. You set up the conveyor belt with the assigned cards lined up. At the end of each round, which is after every player played their turn, the conveyor belt moves, and you’ll have to move all the sausages one tile closer to the meat grinder at the end of the line. There are some exceptions that prevent you to move or make you move even more, but those have to do with the action cards.
During each turn, you can play an action out of the three cards you have in your hands. After your action, you draw a new card and keep your hand at three cards. This can alter when a player steals one of your cards, you steal one of them, or you are allowed to draw an extra one. The actions vary from moving one to four sausages, moving sausages apart or closer together, set up a trap to make the next part of the conveyor belt extra slippery, make the floor sticky, so a sausage or sausages don’t move, you can cut the power and so on. This is one of those games that you’ll be playing in a matter of minutes.
Even if all your assigned sausages are dead, you can still keep playing to try and unlock the ‘Wurst Case Scenario’, which is that there is no winner at all. If the last turn ends with the remaining sausages being thrown in the processor at the same time, nobody wins.
Luck or Strategy?
While there is a lot of luck involved in the drawing of useful cards, there are also a lot of things you can plan and ponder over. You can opt to move your characters, as a ruse, to throw other players off-track, but you can also save some special and interesting cards for when the time calls for it. Overall things seem to be a healthy mix between luck or strategy, which is certainly a plus, and it also allows players with very different skill sets and visions to find the way they want to play the game.
Conclusion
Wurst Case Scenario is a very amusing little card game where you simply compete to be the last sausage standing or sabotage the entire game and make sure there’s no winner at all. This is one of those games that offers very simple rules and interesting gameplay, allowing you to be up and running within minutes. If you’re looking for a fun party game for young and old, then we can only recommend Wurst Case Scenario for that purpose.
Wurst Case Scenario - Board Game Review,
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