Dungeons & Dragons: The Yawning Portal

Designer: Kristian Karlberg, Kenny Zetterberg
Artist: N/A
Published: 2023
Players: 1-4
Playing Time: 45-60 Mins
BGG Rating: 7.2
BGG Ranking: 5611
Publisher: Hasbro
Mechanisms: Hand Management, Matching,
Sleeves: TCG 63,5x88mm

Game Description:

The Yawning Portal is an iconic inn that attracts fascinating adventurers with two things in common: They're famished, and they have unique tastes in food.

As part of the tavern's staff in Dungeons & Dragons: The Yawning Portal, you need to feed them by matching up food tokens with the orders pictured on their hero card. You earn colored gems (and points) for every matching food token, and a bonus for completing an order. The colored gems that appear most frequently on the board receive the highest value, so strategize to tip the scoring scale in your favor — and don't be afraid to use potions to make patrons love your food! Collect more points if you're the first to achieve an objective challenge or earn an endgame bonus. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

Quick play overview:

On their turn a player will choose one of the 4 actions that is available to them.. mostly placing foods on the tables around the inn and trying to sit the heroes at the tables with their preffered dishes… but also removing food and kicking heroes out of the inn…

Each hero would like to eat up to 4 foods (fish, beer, veggies and meat) and tables have 4 slots for food. When you sit a hero at a table, first you can activate his special action (like drawing more cards or changing food around the tables etc.) and then you get one colored crystal for each match between hero's requests and the food on the table (yellow crystal if a beer token is at the exact spot where the hero wants a beer…). If you manage to match all the slots exactly right, you will get a Perfect Match Bonus (PMB) as well and turn the hero's card facedown.

Players will continue to bring out food and try to feed the heroes until there is a food token on both ends of the left and right most tables.

End scoring has a good twist. Players will multiply the number of crystals of each color with the number of facedown heroes of that color in the inn. That's a good reason to kick out some quests as you don't want your opponents to have a high multiplier on certain colors. 

Final thoughts:

I love this game. It's easy to learn and just the perfect lenght for our group.

Theme is original and the mechanisms are very fun. 

Placing the cards on the other side of the table is a bit hard for some players. You need to turn the card in your head as you don't want to show your opponents what you are planing next… which will bring to some cursing at the table when a player will place the cards and food will not match 😊

FINAL SCORE:

Gameplay & How often I want to play it: 10/10

The gameplay is a blast. It's a tactical game where each turn you have to reassess the situation on the board and try to get the best out of the given situation. This game should see over 10 plays each year.

Art & Graphic Design:

The game is beautiful. The board, cards, even the crystals are all well done.

The black rectangles for the text is the only thing that looks a bit ouf of place.

Rules & Complexity:

Rules are simple to learn and robust enough to allow for a very good gameplay.

The game offers some long term strategy at low players count. While bigger groups will enjoy a chaotic feeling of a restaurant at peek hours.

Theme & Mechanism fit:

Feeding the hungry heroes by placing food on the table and sitting heroes around the inn is one of the best mix of theme and mechanisms.

Fun & Replayability:

Placing food around the tables and hoping that others will not touch the table that you just prepared for your next hero is very tense.

If you like the gameplay, you can play this game your whole life and each game will be as interesting as the last one.