Mooncake Master

Plays: 5Px1.

The Game

Mooncake Master is designed by Singaporean designer Daryl Chow. It's a simple and pleasant game about making mooncakes, a Chinese delicacy eaten during the Mid Autumn Festival celebration. I played the game on the day of the Mid Autumn Festival, which makes the experience even more meaningful.

The game box is designed to look like a mooncake box. Absolutely lovely. It comes with a box sleeve which is even prettier. Too bad I didn't take a photo of that.

A game has 3 stages, and at each stage you will make 3 mooncakes. There are only 4 rounds per stage. Every round everybody acts simultaneously. You draw three tiles, look at them, and decide which one to keep, which to give to your left neighbour, and which to give to your right neighbour. After receiving tiles from both your neighbours, you decide how to place all three of your tiles in front of you to make your three mooncakes. Each tile is a quarter of a mooncake. After 4 rounds you would have 12 tiles and they would complete 3 mooncakes. You then score your mooncakes, before removing them and starting a new round. This photo was taken in Round 4 of Stage 1. Some players had completed their three mooncakes. Others were still contemplating how to place the last three pieces.

This is the scoring reference card. The card on the left lists how the mooncakes score flavour points (FP), which are different from victory points (VP). Victory points are represented by lanterns. Let's look at the items one by one. If a mooncake contains only one flavour (i.e. one colour), it is worth 3 flavour points (FP). If it has two flavours, 1FP. Each complete egg yolk is 1FP. If a mooncake has no half yolk, that's 1FP. Finally every hazelnut and sunflower seed pair is worth 1FP. When a stage needs, you total your FP's, and compare with the others. Whoever has the most scores 2VP. Whoever has the least scores nothing. Everyone else scores 1VP. Over three stages, if you are always one of the leading players, you will score 6VP from your mooncakes.

The mooncakes come in three flavours - red bean (pink), lotus (orange) and green tea (green). In this photo you can see I was doing well so far, all three mooncakes were still single-flavoured, and egg yolks were all complete.

Things didn't go so perfectly after that. Well, at least two of the mooncakes were still single-flavoured. Let's take the middle one as an example. It has only one flavour, thus 3 flavour points. One complete egg yolk, so 1FP. No half egg yolks, that's another 1FP. There are two sets of hazelnut plus sunflower seed, so 2FP. The total is 7FP for just this mooncake.

This is a customer card, and this is the other way you score points. If one of your mooncakes fulfill the specific requirements of a customer, you may sell it to him, and score 1 victory point. In Stage 1, there is only one customer. At the start of each subsequent Stage, you add one more customer. If you are able to serve every customer every Stage, you will score 6VP. The requirements of this particular customer are the mooncake must have exactly two complete egg yolks, and it must be single flavoured.

This was taken at Stage 2. You can see there are two customers. There are many different customers in the customer deck, and this creates variability from game to game.

The Play

Mooncake Master is straight-forward and fast. You do things concurrently, so there is little downtime. Adding more players doesn't significantly impact play time. You only need to pay attention to the mooncakes of your immediate neighbours. You want to avoid giving them tiles which help them. It's not always easy to do. You still want to keep a tile that's useful to you. It is probably not worth taking a poor (to you) tile for the sake of giving your neighbours poor (to them) tiles. The game feels like a puzzle game. You first try to figure out how best to allocate those 3 tiles drawn, and after that you try to figure out how to best fit the three tiles you get into your mooncakes. You try to score as many flavour points as possible, and at the same time try to fulfill customer requirements.

Four egg yolks! This photo gave me high cholesterol.

This was Stage 3. You can see three customers revealed.

Those two half egg yolks look ugly. Well, at least there are two hazelnut + sunflower seed combos, contributing 2FP. There are only two flavours, so that's 1FP.

The second customer wants a single yolk lotus mooncake. The third customers wants a single-flavoured mooncake with three hazelnuts. The scoreboard below only goes up to 12VP, because that's the highest possible score.

The Thoughts

Mooncake Master is a cute game. Good for casual gamers and non-gamers, and also for family settings. For boardgame veterans, it works well as a filler. It's not particularly deep, but it does give some light mental exercise and it presents an interesting challenge.