Pizza is the perfect food (tacos also an acceptable substitute). The BGQ discord is regularly full of debates on Chicago style versus New York, topping preferences—I’m pro pineapple—and the amazingness of wood-fired pizza ovens.
But today’s pizza is unfortunately not very tasty. It is, however, a board game. Pizza Party Throwdown in fact. Which makes it a much more appropriate topic for review on this here board gaming related website.
Gameplay Overview:
Complicated this is not.
In Pizza Party Throwdown each player will choose an ingredient and collect their 8 toppings and a plastic pizza chef. You’ll place the cardboard pizza on the spinny-thing and proceed to flick your toppings onto the pizza.
The pizza is divided into slices so you can change the difficulty a bit by requiring the topping to land anywhere on the pizza, on a specific half of the pizza, or on your individual slice. Whoever has the most toppings in the assigned area when the pizza stops spinning wins.
Game Experience:
Alright, when I agreed to review this game, I saw the components and thought this could be a fun dexterity game. Obviously, it has a great theme. The components are pretty solid. The pizza folds in half to store and therefore doesn’t sit entirely flat, but it’s not that big of a deal. I’m not entirely sure what material the toppings are but they feel like some kind of flimsy plastic similar to a really thick window cling and they make a really satisfying “splat” when they land.
But I expected something more to the rules here. Maybe you’d be asked to make the perfect slice with a certain combination of ingredients. Or have various recipes to race to fulfill to earn points. But Pizza Party Throwdown goes for most basic of rules, just telling you to take a pile of toppings and try to flick them onto the cardboard.
The game is more Little Caesars than Giordano’s.
As a toy for children, it works. My son liked playing it. He even went so far as to call it his third favorite board game ever. But he hasn’t really expressed much interest in breaking it out after our initial plays. It does only take about 60 seconds to play so if your little one loves it, even if you don’t, it’s not going to take up much of your evening.
Final Thoughts:
This isn’t a pizza review site but try jalapeños with pineapple on your pizza. Trust me. Also, NY style all day every day please.
Oh… the game. Yeah, Pizza Party Throwdown is ok for kids. I would have liked some more options for a bit more depth of rules for older kids and adults to get more out of this. The plastic pizza peel holding flippers work great and the material the toppings are made from works perfectly. If your kid likes flicking things and doesn’t want to have to pay attention to a board game for more than a minute, Pizza Party Throwdown might be for you.
Final Score: 2.5 Stars – Not my favorite. But the kid liked it quite a lot, but also quickly forgot all about it.
Hits:
• Great components.
• Max’s third favorite game ever!
Misses:
• No options to add any type of rules other than racing to land your toppings.
• The three game modes are just slight difficulty sliders and don’t change anything else.
I too thought the game would be fun but the timer doesn’t work properly, it is very loud and does not spin. The kids just launch the ingredients instead of playing the game. Not worth the money.