Sausage Sizzle Review

boardgamequest.com:

SAUSAGE. SIZZLE. SAUSAGE. SIZZLE. SAUSAGE. SIZZLE. This was the insane chant my wife heard emanating from our basement game room at 11pm one evening while she was trying to sleep. “Could you keep it down please” she pleadingly texted me.

No ma’am, impossible. The vibes were simply too real, the energy too hyped. The stakes were too high. It was a moment of courage. Sausage courage. I apologized when I came to bed later that night, attempting to explain that to ask one of the players to “keep it down” would be game night hosting malpractice.

I’m sure that not everyone’s play of Sausage Sizzle is as dripping with drama as ours was. After all, we’re talking about a 2-5 player push-your-luck Yahtzee-esque dice chucker. But there is something magical in this small box offering from 25th Century Games, created by the seasoned designer husband-and-wife duo of Inka and Markus Brand, and illustrated by the Banksy of Board Games himself, Ian O’Toole. You don’t sell the sausage; you sell the sizzle.

The game could not be simpler. I taught it to a seven-year-old who grasped it right away. There are eight dice, four of which have pictures of one of six animals on each side, while the other four have a combination of dice pips (numbered from 2-5) and either one or two pictures of a sausage.

The goal of the game is to score the most points for each animal. You begin by rolling all eight dice. Like Yahtzee, you can only score each animal once. Also, like Yahtzee, you must keep at least one die after each roll, whether it be an animal die or a number die.

After you’ve completed rolling, you will score the number of like (and unscored) animal dice times the lowest number on any of the number dice. The sausage counts as a one, BUT you can shoot the moon and attempt to get all four dice to show sausage, in which case your multiplier is seven. A tasty proposition to say the least. But if you get three sausages and even one other number, the sausages simply count as ones, and therefore