Steam Up serves a dim sum board game for Chinese immigrant families — like mine

polygon.com:

For many Americans, Sunday brunch means waffles, pancakes, and bacon and eggs. But for my family, and millions of Chinese immigrants, Sunday brunch means just one thing: It’s time for some dim sum. A new board game called Steam up: A Feast of Dim Sum, published by Hot Banana Games, has adapted the tradition of dim sum — small portions of flavorful food steamed inside bamboo baskets — into a novel new board game. While it’s not the first tabletop game to center Chinese traditions at its core, it offers one of the most endearing board game experiences I’ve had in a long time.

As luck would have it, the launch of Steam Up coincided neatly with my 婆婆, or grandmother, Belle Yee’s birthday celebration in Vancouver, where the game was made. I roped in my mother Brenda Ford, my cousin Eric Lee, my cousin Kimberley Lam, and her husband Sing-Yue Lam to sneak in a couple games of Steam Up — an appetizer, if you will — before the big birthday dinner. What we found is a game that is deceptively straightforward, but with lots of moving parts to keep track of.

The setup board looks like a real-life dim sum table, with little steamers to hold pieces and a rotating turntable, just like at the restaurant. On their turn, each player takes two actions of their choosing: taking any one dim sum token, drawing one fortune card and optionally rotating the turntable, playing a fortune card and optionally rotating the turntable, swapping two fortune cards for one token, and/or purchasing a steamer by spending tokens to exactly match the pieces inside.

If a player buys a steamer, they score points. Characters gain different point amounts for different dim sum pieces, and at the end of a round, a fate card is drawn and the effects are resolved.