I’ve had a soft spot for Hot Banana games since I backed Steam Up on Kickstarter. They launched it around the time there was massive upheaval in global shipping because of COVID and said it’d fulfil in about 18 months while everyone else was confidently sticking to quicker turnarounds. They kept their word perfectly and, in my opinion, they’ve succeeded a number of times in delivering engaging and culturally thoughtful games. Let’s fill our bellies with some dim sum!
Introduction and setup
My experience is with playing the deluxe version, not the retail one. But the real difference there is the score markers and food pieces are upgraded, compared to the standard punchboard versions. Gameplay is no different.
It’s an immediately engaging thing – creating the rotating board and piling the wonderful bamboo steamers onto their spaces, filling them with different types of dim sum as you go. There are different rings that you place around the board depending on player count. These show you which steamers are within your segment of the board at any time, and there are some helpful colourful markers you can place to make this more visible at-a-glance.
What I will say about these is that they are prone to being knocked and nudged. The rotating table of steamers is genuinely excellent, but the rings and markers will move around easily.
Players take a character board that has starting resources (all variable) and an asymmetric power for you to use throughout the game. Here we have the first of many wonderful details that really bring the theme home – there are 12 characters to choose from, and each represents one of the animals from the Chinese zodiac. These are listed in full at the back of the rulebook and all include an example of how their unique ability works – more games should be this explicit with things like this.
Starting resources come in the combinations of food tokens and fortune cards – both of which we’ll talk about in some detail a little further below
What’s the aim of the game?
I’ll cover this off before we talk about gameplay more broadly. You’ll score points by taking steamers from the table, placing the pieces of dim sum onto your player board and getting points that correspond to the space you cover.
As well as powers being asymmetric, the layout of points on boards is different too. For example, the last space on the Pig board scores no points (because he’s pigged out too much!) but the Rabbit scores 3 points apiece in the last column, but scores fewer early on.
As you might think, most points at the end of the game wins, but there’s a lot of fun to be had before that!
Let’s get stuck in
Gameplay itself is some nice and simple action selection – choosing two different actions from the five available. I’ll cover those briefly now:
1. Gain a food token from the supply. These match the six different types of dim sum and will be needed to ultimately take a steamer off the board (action 5 below)
2. Draw a fortune card from the deck and then optionally rotate the turntable 90 degrees in either direction
3. Play a fortune card from your hand and then again, optionally rotate the turntable 90 degrees
4. Discard two fortune cards from your hand to gain a food token. This is a nice loophole that will allow you to get two tokens on one turn
5. Purchase a steamer from the table! We’ll cover this in more detail shortly
The first round just proceeds normally, but on subsequent rounds, you’ll first draw a Fate card and play it which adds a small but manageable twist to that round. These usually offer some kind of benefit to the player with the fewest points, or have allow you to play a second fortune card if you use one of your actions to play one.
Fate cards are rarely catastrophic but, speaking from experience, you can get swept up in the excitement of all the stuff on the table and deprioritise remembering to draw a card so do keep that in mind
Let’s get the dim sum
I’ll cover off purchasing a steamer now as it’s a fairly fundamental cornerstone to getting points and will illustrate how some of the other actions can be really beneficial too.
As one of your actions you can spend food tokens from your personal supply to take a steamer from your zone, add the dim sum to your board and score the points. There’s a couple of important things here though
Firstly, the steamer has to be in your zone. If you remember from setup, you’ve likely placed some markers to show what is within your personal zone. As the table rotates through playing fortune cards, you’ll either have steamers completely within your reach or shared with a neighbour. In practice it’ll look like the steam straddles two markers. If a steamer is even partly within your zone you can purchase it.
Secondly, you must spend food tokens that exactly match the contents of the steamer you want. You can only take the top one of a stack, and you have to buy everything in there – you can’t, for example, buy two out of three pieces. It’s all or nothing.
After you’ve done that, you add them to your mate and bank the points and move the tracker token down one space. You’ll set this up at the start in a different place depending on player count.
Fortune favours the hungry
Fortune cards can let you manipulate the game a little more in your favour and range in their power (or certainly their perceived power). There are cards that allow you to purchase a steamer (using the process outlined above), swap a piece of dim sum from one steamer to another, get a token off another player and much more.
These are obviously powerful, but playing them at the right time, or knowing when to ditch a couple of them for a much-needed food token is critical
Finishing our feast
The game ends when the steamer tracker hits zero or if the Fate deck runs out. You play equal turns and then do some simple end-game scoring – an extra point for every two fortune cards in your hand, lose a point for every two unspent food tokens. Most points wins.
We’ll cover a few details in this section because it ties into the end-game scoring. You lose points for unspent food tokens because it’s seen as wasteful – you’ve taken more than you can eat and that isn’t seen as culturally a good thing to have done.
The scoreboard is designed to look like a order chit with table 168 written on it. That number is specific because 8 is a lucky number in Chinese because it rhymes with "wealth” and the number 16 rhymes with “continuous.” So put together, the number 168 signifies “continuous wealth.”
The zone markers I’ve mentioned a few times are designed for each of the five traditional flavours – spicy, sweet, sour, bitter and salty, and the characters on them reflect those. Some fortune cards will allow you to roll the Lucky die which has no number 4 as that sounds like the word for death and is considered unlucky.
All those details really help to tie this together into a wonderfully thematic experience.
Final thoughts
I think this is a great family game and brings together some wonderful cultural elements into a visual and tactile experience that is genuinely a lot of fun.
The only problem I’ve really run into with it is at the max player count of five and I’ll cover that briefly now. With a full complement of players, the game ends after every steamer has been taken. If that’s not done by the final player, it means everyone else has effectively an empty final turn, trying to avoid getting a food token that will put them into a negative point situation. Working back from that, when there’s only a single steamer left, it can often be obvious who’s going to get it depending on its contents and who has what food tokens. So the end-game just has the potential to run out of steam (sorry).
It is a delightful experience though and you can really sense the love that’s gone into every element of the design, components and gameplay
