IF I EVER HAVE TIME AND INTEREST, I might expand upon this, but the gist is that Sushi GO: Party violates my principle to Prefer simple components with complex interactions over complex components without introducing meaningfully better gameplay.
Sushi GO: Core Gameplay
And of course, both versions of Sushi GO can be reduced somewhat into this: aim to pick cards which are more than 2.5 points per card more often than your opponents. In the base game, this is easy to evaluate:
- Nagiri: 1 card worth 1, 2, or 3 PPC
- Tempura: 2 cards worth 2.5 PPC
- Sashimi: 3 cards worth 3.3 PPC
- Wasabi: 2 cards worth 2-3 PPC
- Maki: variable, but if you can win on 2 cards, it’s 2 cards worth 3PPC and otherwise it’s terrible
- Pudding: variable, but if you can win on 3 cards, it’s 3 cards worth 2PPC plus what ever the negative is to the opponents.
- Dumpling: you need 5 to make it 5 cards worth 3 PPC
So in sum, there’s very obvious strengths and weaknesses to the cards which can quickly be understood by all the players. This allows the game to quickly move to being played at the metagame frontier, which is the interesting and interactive part of the game. Sushi GO Allows Players to Quickly Reach the Metagame Frontier. What about Risk adjusted return for cards in Sushi GO? That’s maybe for another time.
Where Sushi GO: Party Fails
Sushi GO Party muddles this by introducing combinatorically more decks to draft from with slight variations on each of the cards above. The reductionist in me sees these all as similar attempts to produce 2.5 PPC cards, but because the cards are more complicated, they’re more difficult to reason about. For example, Onigiri is a more complex Sashimi which requires the players to remember exactly which of the four shapes are across each pack, and can punish players with the distribution of shapes in the packs. And because every game contains a different combination of such cards, it’s difficult for a metagame to evolve for each unique context.