Ready, Set, Chop!

🥕 Diced Veggies has one of the best novelty mechanics I’ve seen: to draft dice 🎲 representing ingredients for recipes, you actually slice them off the shared central dice block using a cardboard cleaver 🔪. It’s such a brilliant touch that I gave it a standing ovation when I first saw it! 😄 It also helps that games from @kidstablebg look absolutely beautiful. The ingredient dice look almost edible (and delicious 😋) and the overall design is just gorgeous—from the box art to the card layouts to the font choices. 

Diced Veggies is a lightweight game themed around cooking. 🍳 where each turn, you slice some dice for yourself, possibly complete one or more recipes and draw a card. Slicing is simple but with some important rules: 👉The sum of the dice values that you get cannot be above 10. Also, you need to be able to physically slide the dice to the side with the cardboard cleaver, so you can only take things from the side.

If you have enough dice to complete a recipe card, you can play it to earn points. The game goes until someone has completed 6 recipes, so efficiency is important. However that is not all! ☝️ You can also draw and play Hype cards (one per recipe) that add additional points if you complete them. There are all kinds of requirements - some harder, some easier. E.g. use only dice of value 6; or the sum of dice have to be 19. Normally you would only look for dice color for recipes, but hype cards make their values important as well. Really, I think Hype cards elevate the game to something really fun! 🙃

Generally the game is really wholesome, and I especially like how the Hype cards have a phrase that you can read together with the name of your dish for some added thematic touch. You aren’t just preparing a Greek Salad; you are preparing a “You Will Never Ever Find Better Greek Salad”. 😁 Slicing dice is both fun and clever, and the game includes a handy cardboard frame to keep the dice block neat, so it’s never fiddly. A fantastic gateway game!