Waffle Time

• Designer: Maxime Demeyere
• Publisher: AEG
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with copy provided by publisher

It’s a wonderful lazy morning and your stomach is grumbling. What’s that heavenly smell coming from the kitchen? It’s Waffle Time! Draft combinations of fruit toppings and whipped cream to load up your waffle. Create patterns to spread syrup for scoring points. What you draft not only affects your score, but also your turn order and how much syrup you can use. After eight quick rounds, the player with the highest scoring waffle is the winner!

To set up the game, randomize the 9 draft tokens on the draft board, and the place the turn order tile around the outside.  Grab one fruit pattern card for each of the five types of fruit.  The standard scoring card is placed on the table as are 3 random goal cards.  Each of the random cards also gets a butter token placed on it.   Each player gets a waffle board and a syrup card and 6 syrup beads; the back side of which shows the starting arrangement of the cream and fruit toppings on their waffle.  Player tokens are randomized onto spots on the turn order board, and players later in turn order will get extra syrup.

The game is played in 8 rounds; and in each one, player order is determined by the position of the markers on the turn order board.  There are 4 parts to a turn:

1] place your pawn in any open half-circle spot and then collect the two toppings that are closest to your pawn on the board.  

2] place the two toppings in adjacent spaces, making sure to place cream only on empty spaces, fruit on empty or cream filled spaces, and syrup being placed only on a player’s syrup dispense card

3] check your waffle board to see if you have any fruit patterns that match the pattern cards, and if so, take syrup from your dispenser card and place it over the fruit in that pattern.  You must have placed at least one fruit token this turn in the pattern to claim it.

4] Check the goal cards to see if you have met any of the criteria. If you are the first to meet one, you can take the butter token on that goal and place it in any empty waffle space.

Continue this until all players have taken a turn.  Move the turn order tile one space, and then place the pawns onto that tile with the closest pawn to the turn order tile going first next turn.  Players later in turn order will again get a syrup bonus.  Finally, look at the turn order tile, the right side has a fork shown on it – the three tiles in line with the fork are flipped over to the other side.

At the end of 8 turns, players score their board

• 1 point for a space with syrup on fruit
• 2 points for a space with butter
• 3 points for a space with syrup on fruit on cream
• Points for each completed goal, as stated on goal card
• 2 points if you have no syrup on your dispenser card

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of earliest turn order in the imaginary 9th round.

My thoughts on the game

Waffle Time is a fun light puzzle game.  It has a number of parts which I have liked from other games.  The drafting mechanism and the effect it has on the next turn’s play order is one of my favorites. Each round, you have to weigh the options of which toppings to grab versus what it might do to your options in the next round.  Sure, sometimes things just work out and the right toppings are in the first available space – but more often than not, you’ll be faced with some challenging decisions.  

You can sometimes try to plan ahead, maybe taking a substandard choice in the current turn to ensure going first in the next turn; but you’ll need to remember that the draft board will change each round as the three tiles in the row with the fork will flip over.  Maybe you’ve been super observant, and you remember what is on the back side of those tiles from previous flips…. 

You will score points for stacking the toppings (and hopefully syrup), so setting up those combos will likely drive your choices.   You won’t fill your whole board up – there are 18 empty spaces after setup, and you’ll only place 2 per turn x 8 turns… and if you choose syrup from the draft board, those don’t go onto the board immediately.  Trying to keep things close to each other to form patterns is important, and then you can plop the syrup down.  Be sure to closely examine both the pattern and goal cards to maximize your actions.

The components are just fine.  Nothing flashy about them, and everything works.  I like the way the draft board has cutouts that fit the player pieces.  The artwork is clean and unobtrusive.  That being said, there is also nothing spectacular about the bits either.

In the end, Waffle Time is a nice introductory game for both drafting and puzzling.  It’s admittedly somewhat simple, but I think it gives a nice game for the short amount of time it takes to play.  The random goal cards will make you approach each game a little different, and of course, you’ll always have to make tactical decisions on the fly based on what your opponents are doing.  As it also has a solo game – where you try to maximize your score in a mock 2p game setup – you can also try to hone your skills when you have no one else to play with.  In the future, this is a game that would likely be best with my middle school aged nephews and nieces than my game group; but I do think it would go great in that setting.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor