Punch Bowl
- Board's Eye View
- Jul 2
- 3 min read
If your cup runneth over, you're not just prospering according to the 23rd Psalm, you're also likely to be doing well in Runaway Parade's Punch Bowl. In this game, designed by Samuel Bryant and Gwen Ruelle, the 2-4 players are adding fruit and ice cubes to their punches. Players all have their own punch glasses, and the player who has the highest value of fruit, seltzer and ice cubes will be the winner, provided of course that they haven't left a pile of unused fruit to rot and incur negative points...
The most immediately striking thing about Punch Bowl is the components, or should we say ingredients? The game uses tasty-looking plastic fruit pieces to represent the orange and lemon slices, strawberries and grapes players are adding to the three punches, along with realistic plastic ice cubes. At stages of the game you'll be notionally using ladles to serve punch to your actual glass.
The game is card driven but it's not so much a deck builder as a deck deconstructor. Each round, you draw three Revel cards from your individual deck and choose one to play for the actions it triggers, one to save, where it will eventually be recycled when your draw deck is exhausted, and one to completely remove from the game. Tho' players all start each game with identical draw decks, their process of trashing a card each round means their decks diverge over the course of play. The cards mostly let you add one or more fruit to one of the punches and move fruit between punches.
A custom six-sided die is rolled each round to determine which of the three punches is advanced or served, depending on whether or not it has a ladle. When a punch is served, the player with the highest total value of fruit in the punch gets to add some of the fruit to their glass, where it's going to contribute to their end-game score. Players also get to add ice cubes to their glass if they are the first player to satisfy a recipe card's requirements for a specific combination of fruit. Players all start with a seltzer bottle that add a push-your-luck element into the game. When adding a fruit, you can substitute your seltzer. It doesn't count towards your area control but it's worth two points to the winner of the punch, who gets to add the selzer to their glass in lieu of a fruit. Players lose two points if they haven't used their selzer before the end of the game, so you want to place the selzer in a punch you reckon you are in with a strong prospect of winning.
Punch Bowl plays quickly: the card trashing mechanic means it runs to a punchy maximum of nine rounds, tho' a player who reckons their glass is fuller than their opponents' may be able to hasten the end-game by exhausting their supply of fruit before players' cards run out.
Shown here is a prototype of Punch Bowl produced by Runaway Parade ahead of the game's upcoming launch on Kickstarter. Players each use all the fruits, differentiating 'ownership' by positioning their fruit in an assigned quadrant of each punchbowl, so some members of the Board's Eye View team were initially confused that each player was identified with a specific fruit. We've certainly enjoyed the card-driven manipulation of ingredients and the strong push-your-luck element engendered by the selzer and by the dice determination of which punch is to be served that round. Click here to check out Punch Bowl for yourself.
