Great Evening Banquet
- Board's Eye View
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
If you've ever agonised and argued over seating plans for a wedding or other major function, you'll immediately appreciate the theme of Great Evening Banquet. In this game for 1-4 players you'll be allocating guests to six tables on which there are particular requirements. So, for example, there may be a table demanding at least two guests with the wine-glass toast symbol or where you should not place any guest tile with a blue background.
Like Shall We Dance, Great Evening Banquet is a set collection card game from Saashi & Saashi, designed by Saashi. There's a high society Downton Abbey vibe to Takako Takarai's charming artwork. It's a drafting game where, in each of nine rounds, different numbers of guest 'arrive' by carriage. Players draft their choice of carriage and allocate the arriving guest(s) to tables in their individual tableau. In the early rounds, you'll pretty much have a free choice because most of the tables will have vacant spaces but as the game proceeds and your tables fill, so your placement options diminish and you can be forced to draft guest tokens for which you have only suboptimal placements...
Tables score as soon as they fill (ie: have four guests allocated to them). There's a key setting out scoring for particular groupings of guests (for example, pairs of guests of the same type, or three or four the same) and different colour tile backgrounds. However, you only score the full amount if your table requirements are met; otherwise you get just score half the points. Tables score again at the end of the game for satisfying the requirements of the row and column in which they are placed.
With its clear iconography, Great Evening Banquet is quick and easy to teach and learn, and it plays in around 20-30 minutes. Tho' players draft in turn order, tile placement in their tableaus is simultaneous, which keeps gameplay brisk. And if you want to step up the challenge, there are advanced rules that push the tables together so that six of the guests count as being on two tables at the same time...
