SNAP Review – Robots Ate Our Pizza

Game

Robots Ate Our Pizza is a cooperative card game for 2-6 players designed by the Donoho family with art by Angela Trusock. It’s best for ages 8 and up and takes about 20 minutes to play.

You can buy Robots Ate Our Pizza at RobotsAteOurPizza.com or through Amazon, for about $15.

Art

Art is fine & functional. Robots are cute – until you see them eating the pizza!

Two weird decisions – the robot name (suit name) is only on the 1 of each suit (and on the pizza cards). And the card numbers are only on the upper left of each card, meaning they’re only visible in one orientation, leaving us to rotate all the cards after first picking up our hand.

Mechanics

Robots have crashed your pizza party and challenged you to a contest, with your pizza on the line! They assign you 4 set-collection tasks.

At the beginning of each task, give every player 5 cards. The first player will select one from their hand, and play it face up to the table. Every other player plays one card from their respective hands, in turn order. Once everyone has played, pass your hand of cards to the left.

Then every player plays a card again, then passes their hand again.

Once all players have 4 cards in front of them, it’s time to score each player’s hand.

Look for sets of matching numbers; sets of matching colors; and runs (1-2-3) in any combination of colors.

Some cards may be part of more than one set – score them for every set they’re in!

Here’s the catch – as a group, you’re aiming for a different score for each task: first a combined high score, then a combined low score, then maximize the difference between two players’ scores, and minimize the difference between ALL players’ scores.

Confused yet? You also are not supposed to communicate what’s in your hand or what you’re trying to collect.

Your team of humans starts with 8 pieces of pizza. After each task, compare your team’s score to the rubric on the task card to see how much pizza the robots eat. (Flip over the pizza cards!)

Will you have any pizza left after your 4 tasks are complete?

Expectations

Robots Ate Our Pizza is cute. We expected that it would have an “educational” feel to it and be a fun game to play with our kids.

I was puzzled at the concept, though. How do you turn card drafting and set collection into a cooperative game?

Surprises

It’s educational, but not in the way were expecting. There’s not much math here although the scoring (runs, color pairs, number pairs) feels very “mathy”. We bent the “no communication” rule and discussed a lot of probability with our kids, too.

The way the cooperation worked was surprising! It feels kind of like The Crew (our review), in which your group is attempting to complete tasks or missions with minimal communication. You need to look around at the table and figure out both which cards are good for you and which cards you really want to pass to your teammates.

Unfortunately, Robots Ate Our Pizza also feels a little unfinished. Part of this is the simplicity of the art, but a larger part is that there’s no storyline or strong theme to hook us.

Why are we trying for different outcomes for the different tasks? Give me a reason why the variations change the way scoring works!

This lack of a hook meant our kids struggled to stay engaged.

Recommended?

Robots Ate Our Pizza is a good way to pass 20 minutes while teaching kids more about planning and probability. It’s not our favorite, but we’ll be keeping it around for a while.

What should we rate Robots Ate Our Pizza? 2 1/2 pizza slices out of 5.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Robots Ate Our Pizza for this review.

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