Tomatoss Review: Quick Take with Tom Vasel
Transcript
Tomatoes. This is a festival where everyone is running around throwing tomatoes at each other. I don't know if I want to be part of a festival like that or not. Like it'd be fun, but wouldn't it hurt? And incredibly messy. I'd rather do like the the the powder festivals. But anyhow, that's what this game is about. Let's see how it plays. In this game, players are trying to get the most points by throwing tomatoes at other people. You'll start with a certain number of cards in your hand based on the number of players. You have a little board in front of you that does keep track of how many cards of each. There's a lot of three threes in the deck. There's 13 of them. And only four sevens and only three ones. And what you're going to do is you have these three tokens on your turn and you can take three actions. If I put them on the bottom, I take that tomato card that's underneath it, replacing it immediately. In fact, I could take this seven, replace it from the deck, put another one in there, and I could take multiple actions of the same type. At the end of your turn, if all three tokens are on the same thing, you get an extra card. If two are on the same thing, you'll flip your basket over.
You'll have a basket token in front of you. And whenever you flip from the full side to the other side, you get a card from the top of the tomato deck. The other thing you can do is you can try to fulfill one of these conditions up here. So, when you do that, I can say, "Oh, I'm going to fulfill this one." It says I need two cards that equal 10, and it will give me four points. Well, that's tricky to do since my hand is a four and a three. But there are two ways, obviously. I can take this seven, add it to my hand, and then play the seven and three and get a 10. But I want to do a quick toss. When you put a token down, I can say, "I'm doing a quick toss." You can play a card from your hand or more, and then draw the top card from the the pile here. If that works, I won't get the four points, I would get the eight points instead. So, you're kind of gambling there. Oh man, I played the three. If I had played the four and got the six, then I would have made it and got eight points. Whenever you fail quick toss, any cards you use are discarded and it stays there. Again, if you solve one of these, it's replaced with the next one and you can try to do that one, too. Again, trying to put two tomatoes on the same space.
All kinds of things that you can do here. Some of them do not allow threes to be played. Some just say you can play one or more cards as long as it's between six and eight. Here I subtract one card from another card and the answer has to be either four, five, or six. And when this deck of cards runs out, whoever has the most points is the winner. So, this game has two really interesting mechanisms. The tokens, as you put them out, putting the same token on top of each other gives you extra tomatoes, which is great. By the way, you have a limit of eight between turns or whatever. But, that that's kind of a cool mechanism. But, the mechanism that's really interesting is that whole quick toss idea where I'm going to draw a card from the top of deck. It's probably not going to work, but if you can kind of Now, I showed you one where it's card plus card, but what if it was try to have cards within a certain range?
[snorts]
So, let's say the range is between five and seven, five, six, seven. So, I play a three. Like, well, there's a lot of threes in a deck, so I'll probably get a three, but if I get a two or a four, my odds are better drawing that card off the top of deck. Of course, you're going to have a less point scoring probably for that quick toss, but the quick toss is always more points than just for sure doing it. That's just amusing. This game has a little bit of a let's see what happens, but you don't have to play that way. You can also just faithfully just turn into tomatoes and get points that way. And so, it's a quick, simple little game, 20 minutes long, that I found to be odd but interesting. A fun little game, eight out of 10 tomatoes.