Burger Slam

• Designer: Christoph Behre
• Publisher: Amigo
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 8+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3Ny7s3K 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

You’re the proud owners of a Sixties diner. Your specialties are the worldrenowned Standard Burgers and Big Burgers. Especially remarkable is how simple your burgers are, because they only consist of four types of toppings. Pick the toppings you’ll be using: meat patties or veggie patties? Lactose-free cheese or cheddar? Cherry tomatoes or dried Italian tomatoes? Anything goes! Who will manage to get the most correct burgers out when orders are flooding in?

In Burger Slam, players assemble burgers collectively — but you want to be the one who gets credit for it, so get ready to snatch it away from the hands of others.

Shuffle the sixty ingredient cards, then distribute them equally into face-down piles. Set the plate in the middle of the table, with the burger bun next to it.  Players don’t look at their cards.

On your turn, reveal the top card of your pile and place it face up on the plate, with everyone trying to keep track of what’s been served.  To be fair, flip the card away from you so that other players see the card before you – and this will encourage you to flip the card as fast as possible!  Try to cover the entirety of the card underneath it.

If you think that a standard burger — that is, two cards of each ingredient — or a big burger — seven cards of any one ingredient — is ready to be served, then grab the burger bun and finish it.  You do need to announce which of the burgers you think was made.  It doesn’t matter what order the needed ingredients are found – it only matters that they were in the stack.  

Other players can believe you’re correct or doubt you. If everyone believes you, you don’t even bother to check the stack, you simply put the cards on the bottom of your personal deck. If someone calls you out, you then check the burger.  Whoever was wrong gives two cards from their pile to the other player, along with all of the cards in the middle of play. Once a player has no cards left after a burger has been made, the game ends, and whoever has the most cards wins.

Burger Slam has special cards that can be included for more complex play.  They use a separate deck of sixteen cards that add new rules to the game. A few rule cards are flipped up at the start of the hand.  You might get the ketchup effect which nullifies any card directly under a card with ketchup on it. Mustard will double the card played directly after it.  You might only be able to make big burgers or only standard burgers.  Heck, you might even get the Kid’s meal card that lets you make a hamburger that is missing one type of ingredient.  

My thoughts on the game

Burger Slam is a simple speed game which I think is best played as quickly as possible.  If players don’t have a lot of time to process what is in the stack, then you have to rely upon a combination of your memory, your intuition and possibly a bit of luck to slam the wooden burger on the plate to claim the stack of cards.

As the game progresses on, you may have to take some risks because you’ll need to eventually win a burger in order to get cards back into your stack.   The game can go by in a flash – in a 4p game, you only get fifteen cards in your stack, so the pressure is on nearly immediately to win a stack of cards.

Oh, for what it’s worth, we don’t try to pick up the burger – we just slam our hands on it, and whichever hand is on the bottom of the stack is the “winner” of the race to compete the burger.  But, to each their own.

The expert cards definitely give you a few more things to think about but I personally find that the need to explain all the cards outweighs the time it takes.  I like being able to show the two basic burgers and get the game started within a minute.  For me, it’s the basic game all the way – gimme quick silly fun without anyone worrying about advanced rules..

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3Ny7s3K 

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.
• Neutral. Dale Y
• Not for me…