After trying the game at Essen I thought I owed the community to write a review of the game. The short review is: we were interested by the theme, but the game itself is terrible. Jump to the summary to see the highlights.
DISCLAIMER: This whole review is based in the first printing that could be bought in Essen 2014. I have been told that most of my issues will be fixed for the next printing. So take this review with a grain of salt.
You are still here? Ok, then prepare for a wall of text. Let me start with a review of the components.
The game comes with quite a lot of cards, although slightly low quality: since cards have black border just by removing the shrinkwrap they get dented...but it is no problem if you sleeve the cards (or don't card too much about a bit of wear in them).
The dice are great, and the artwork is very nice. It is spicy, but in a comic format perfectly within reason. Thumbs up for that. Overall, I would say you get a good amount of stuff for a reasonable price tag.
However, one big problem comes in the graphic design of the cards. In the beginning of the game you must separate the initial hand from the rest of the deck. You can tell which cards come in the starting hand because they have a borders of different colors. In this case one image is worth a thousand words:
Can you spot the difference in the cards? It took us 10 minutes to sort the cards. Worst of all, during the game these cards are shuffled with the main deck. So expect to do this before starting each game! Of course you can forget about playing this game if you are colorblind or want to play or with dim lights.
It is also worth mentioning that some cards have typos (one of which really confused us (we could not understand what was the purpose of the card). Now look at the icons in this picture.
Similarly, the icons for female dancer is very similar to the waitress icon (and close to male dancer as well). 386
UPDATE: As <PERSON> mentioned, the background helps distinguishing the icons. We did not notice that, I apologize for that.
In any case, my overall judgement of the components is the same: the game has nice art, perfect for the theme, but a few errors in the layout of the cards. UPDATE: I got an e-mail from <PERSON> saying that this will be fixed in the new printing. I am glad that my feedback somehow helped with the game
Let's forget the form and go to the game itself. Just in case, you do not know how to play, here you have a small summary of the rules:
in each of the 5 rounds you have to serve a customer. Each customer consists of roughly 3 desires and orders.
A desire is just an icon (say, male dancer). You are only allowed to play cards that matches at least one of the 3 desires of the customer.
Orders are also a bunch of icons (say, 2 women + 1 drink) followed by a reward (in the form of VPs, or more resources). If you satisfy an order, you get its reward.
Naturally, the objective in a turn is to satisfy as many orders as possible. For that you play cards from your hand. Some cards give you fixed icons (to satisfy orders), sometimes you get dice (i.e., you roll and get random icons), and other cards are events that allow you to bend the rules.
The last resource you have is "patron's favours": they are one-time use resources that can buy you the missing icon, even protect from the opponents' events, or reroll dice.
A nice feature of the game is that here you have a time limit: we reveal the desires and orders of the customer, and you only have 30 seconds to choose your cards. Everyone does this in parallel, and then we resolve the cards one by one.
The idea sounds simple, and interesting, right? Lots of choices to manage your hand, save your good cards for customers that pay well, try to get cards of all icons, etc...
In paper the rules seemed ok, but in practice it doesn't work. All orders are very similar (sure, 1 cigar less but add 2 girls)...and what is worse: many rewards are "pick up a card you just used back into your hand", so there is no incentive in saving your good cards for later. The turn simply consists of going through your hand and picking the best 4 cards that you can play. No decisions to be done in here.
After that, each player resolves his turn in order. you roll your dice in a Yahtzee style, each time locking some of your dice. Now you have to optimize the resources you have, combined with those that you need. 755