Pluto Dinerama is a cooperative/competitive board game set in a quirky retro-futuristic diner in space. 2-5 players compete to serve the most customers and outlast unscrupulous rival corporate diners. In the game, you’ll manage resources, hire staff, and improve your diner’s facilities to attract a variety of alien patrons. A game can take 60 minutes or more. Each round presents new challenges and opportunities as players navigate the diner’s bustling atmosphere, trying to balance speed and quality of service.
We are reviewing a copy provided to us by the game designer. This is a prototype, i.e. pre-Kickstarter version, of the game. There may be some differences in the final version of the game. At the time of publishing this review, Kickstarter has comfortably exceeded its funding goal.
A unique blend of cooperation and competition
The game features a variety of strategic elements, including customizing menus, managing customer satisfaction, and optimizing kitchen operations. With a unique theme, engaging mechanics, and quirky artwork, Pluto Dinerama aims to provide a fun and competitive experience for board game enthusiasts and casual players alike.
The Event Stage balances the strategic element with mini party games that break up gameplay and allow everyone playing the game to interact with each other. The game starts out cooperative but eventually becomes competitive if the rival diner loses. Pluto Dinerama ends when someone seats 10 customers, or if the corporate space diner is the first to seat 10 customers, everyone can lose to the rival diner.
Pluto Dinerama components and gameplay mechanics
The game comes with a placemat for each player to help players keep track of their food and atmosphere scores as well as remind them what to do during their turn, and it also comes with a translucent cube for different types of tracking and a number of cards with different objectives, detailing each one.
You’ll be given five starter cards that correspond to the placemat colors. These contain everything you need to get started: food, ambiance, and cooks. In addition to the starter cards, there are supply cards, event cards, and customer cards. According to the game designers, the final version of the game will also come with a physical rule book, custom pen, and receipt pad.
Each player is dealt five cards from the supply deck. The cards in the supply deck consist of food, ambiance, cooks, and waiters. More waiters allow players to perform more actions per turn. There is also a pool of three cards drawn face up from the supply deck from which players can draw during their turn. These are called daily specials.
A round is called a day, which at Pluto Dinerama consists of a morning, afternoon and evening.
Play in Pluto Dinerama is divided into rounds called Days. Each round consists of a Morning, Afternoon, and Night stage. During the morning, customers queue up. The number of customers in queue is twice the number of players plus one. So, if there are two players, there will be five customers in queue each day. If there are five players, there will be eleven customers in queue each day. Some customers can be seated immediately, while others must meet certain conditions before they can be seated in the diner.
Resource and staff management
Throughout the afternoon, players take actions and try to seat customers. Will you draw cards from the supply card deck or the daily menu? Add food or ambiance to your space diner? Add cooks or waiters? Everything you play helps you fulfill more and more of the conditions on your cards, potentially tipping the tide of gameplay in your favor.
There are also additional rules detailing when players can trade and what they can trade. Players can discard cards from their hand to gain additional actions. There are rules for maintaining a diner’s position and for moving seated customers. Once a player’s action is resolved, they attempt to seat a customer. If they cannot be seated, they receive a Hungry token. If they cannot be seated in the next round, that customer goes to an evil rival diner.
Event Cards: Add variety and challenge
As the night goes on, events take place. The event cards drawn can be strategic or creative in nature, or they can be party mini-games. Some cards have players come up with space puns, participate in brute-force thumb wars, or even design their own employees.
Winning gives rewards, usually in the form of event tokens, while losing an event can also incur penalties. An event token is worth two stars, and the player with the most event tokens at the end of the game receives an additional five stars.
At the end of the game, the player with the most stars is the winner. In addition to the stars earned for the event, you can also earn stars for the best food or atmosphere. Players add up all the stars earned by their seated customers to determine the winner. Congratulations, winner! You just had a tastier meal than your friends or your creepy company.
What makes Pluto Dinerama stand out?
The instructions provided are clear and concise. If there were any points that were still a bit confusing, I resolved it by going back to the instructions and reviewing points that I had missed the first time I read it. The game is well thought out. Nearly every mechanic is balanced to make the game fun. The rules also encourage flexibility and fun. They specifically mention the types of event cards and that you can remove types that you feel make the game too strategic or not strategic enough.
In particular, there were five Strategy cards that players felt were too restrictive in the conditions for success. All players had to sacrifice four times the amount of food as the number of players. The total seemed too high. Two times seemed achievable as a group. Four times seemed too demanding, resulting in a quick win for the rival diner. The Creative and Game Event cards are varied and will likely be a lot of fun to play the next time you play Pluto Dinerama. This game is highly replayable.
Art, design and print quality
In particular, the art style of the customer cards is cute and imaginative. The text on the cards is peppered with pop culture references. If you’re not paying close attention, you might miss some of the hilarious text and art. The color choices are great, although they may be hard to distinguish for those with color blindness. The physical pieces of the game are nicely printed and glossy, yet still easy to read.
Pluto Dinerama has the secret to a successful game night: a fun party game with a good mix of cooperative and competitive elements. Events diversify the gameplay, making it fresh and dynamic. Pluto Dinerama launched on Kickstarter on August 19th. The campaign’s goal is to bring this creative concept to life and take backers on a space cooking adventure. The game reached its funding goal of $7,500 in less than an hour and has since raised over $21,000. If you want to play Pluto Dinerama, please visit the Kickstarter page to follow or support it.
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Eileen is a writer and artist based in Westchester, NY. She’s also the owner and editor of PopGeeks. As a creator of websites and human lives, she’s done a few things and been a few places. When she’s not playing Breath of the Wild to the point of being terrifying, she enjoys retro games, indie video games, a socially acceptable amount of Call of Duty, and Dungeons and Dragons.
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