P for Pizza Review

The next game from my Dig & Find haul is named P for Pizza. I found it amongst some other goodies, in a pizza-slice-shaped box. How appropriate, right? It definitely caught my eye! Now that I’ve gotten to give it a few plays, does it satisfy my taste as much as real pizza?

P for Pizza is a real-time category game in which players must put their brains to the test to be the first to create a match each round. Creating a match earns you that Pizza Card, and you will use Pizza Cards to build a giant slice in your tableau. The first player to complete their giant slice with 9 total Pizza Cards is the winner of the game! Setup for a game is simple: gather a stack of Pizza Cards and place them in a pile, category-side up. Flip the top 3 cards and lay them around the deck with their letter-side facing upwards. And BAM! That’s it. The game is ready to begin. The game setup is pictured below.

Each Pizza Card in the deck has 3 categories, and the surrounding Pizza Cards each have a letter that faces a category. When the round begins, you must quickly think of a word that fits one of the categories, and begins with its corresponding letter. For example, using the setup picture from above, I might say “Spider-Man” for the Fictional Character category. Or “New Kids On the Block concert” for the Requires Tickets category. If you are the first person to shout out a correct answer, take the corresponding letter Pizza Card and add it to your giant slice. Then, take the Pizza Card from the center (with the categories you just used) and flip it over to refill the empty space from the letter Pizza Card that was taken. This reveals a new card of categories, and a new round immediately begins! Play continues in this fashion until one player has completed their giant slice with 9 total Pizza Cards.

Sounds simple enough, right? But there’s a catch. The categories are broken down by difficulty: Easy, Medium, and Hard. Depending on which difficulty you answer, that dictates where on your giant slice you may place your new Pizza Card! Answering Easy categories only allows you to place the Pizza Card on the bottom-most level of your giant slice. Medium difficulty means you can place the Pizza Card on the middle or bottom level, and Hard difficulty is the only category Pizza Card that can be placed on top of your giant slice! So as the game goes on, it progressively gets harder, as you must increase the category difficulty in order to continue building your giant slice!

I’ll briefly touch on components before I get into my final thoughts about the gameplay. The production quality of this game is ok. It’s not amazing by any means, but it’s decent enough overall. The triangular-shaped cards is a neat twist, and the artwork/text is simple, yet thematic. Not bad for a light little filler-type game.

Now onto the gameplay. It’s alright. Kind of like the components, it’s not amazing but it’s not bad either. It gives off major Scattergories vibes, with the biggest difference being that each category uses a different letter, as opposed to the entire round being based around one letter. It’s a neat twist on a real-time word game, and it’s pretty simple to teach, learn, and play. Sometimes the letter and category pairings are really difficult to work with, but you just have to hope that that category card gets taken quickly so you can move onto something more manageable. Probably the element that I like the most is the incorporation of the 3 difficulty levels. In order to win the game, you must progressively come up with answers for the harder categories. This balances out the gameplay because it stops players from simply answering only the Easy category every single round. I really like that about this game.

All in all, is P for Pizza a game that I see staying in my collection long-term? Not really. I enjoy the occasional word game, but I find myself more often leaning towards more strategy-based games lately. Not necessarily a knock on this game, but my gaming preferences don’t necessarily line up with this game right now. That being said, Purple Phoenix Games gives this one a melty 3 / 6.