Pizza Pizza Yum Yum

• What's Eric Playing?
A red game box for 'Pizza Pizza Yum Yum' featuring a pizza slice with a chef's hat and playful typography.

Base price: $12.
2 players.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
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Logged plays: 2

It is kind of baffling how poorly I eat at Gen Con. I think it’s a combination of lack of access, crowds, and lack of time that other cons don’t really end up hitting. PAXU has access to Reading Terminal Market so that’s never an issue, and PAX West is just much smaller scale. I think Gen Con tries, but the weather isn’t usually particularly cooperative either, so nobody really wants to go outside. I actually ate pretty well this year, but I think the person in the room next to me ate Domino’s every night, may they rest in peace. It’s with this in mind that I bring up the latest Button Shy game to grace my desk, Pizza Pizza Yum Yum!

In Pizza Pizza Yum Yum, your ultimate goal is the yummiest pizzas in town. So you have to coordinate with another chef to cook well and cook fast. Unfortunately, since you also run a restaurant, you need to set the menu before you’re even done with the pizza! You’ll need to balance skill and luck to pull off a perfect pizza placement; will you be able to do so? Or will you just end up making a mess?

Contents

Setup

This one’s dead simple. Shuffle the cards and deal each player six.

A circular arrangement of pizza slices and menu cards laid out on a black background, showcasing various toppings like pepperoni, mushrooms, and green leaves.

You’re good to go!

A stack of 'Pizza Pizza Yum Yum' game cards displayed on a black background.

Gameplay

A close-up image of a pizza card from the game Pizza Pizza Yum Yum, featuring toppings such as pepperoni and basil on a checkered background.

Your goal is simple: make the best pizzas!

Each turn you’ll either PIZZA or YUM. To Pizza, you’ll play a card to your pizza from your hand. To Yum, you’ll play a card to your Menu, which provides scoring options for a specific pizza. The game is Pizza Pizza Yum Yum because you play to your pizza, your coplayer’s pizza, then your menu, then your coplayer’s menu. Finally, you play your last two cards on your pizza and your coplayer’s pizza.

Game cards depicting pizzas with various toppings, laid out on a checkered tablecloth background.

You’ll have two full pizzas and two Menus with two cards each. Use those to score each pizza, and keep track of the lower score. Shuffle all used cards back in with the set-aside cards, deal each player six, and go again!

After three rounds, total your round scores and see how you did!

Player Count Differences

None here; still only a two-player game.

Strategy

A colorful pizza game board featuring a pizza topped with pepperoni, mushrooms, and basil leaves, surrounded by checkered menu cards.
  • I generally try to signal early that I’m going to play a card that scores one type of ingredient twice. If you’re building up a pizza with a lot of one ingredient, hopefully you or your partner have the card that scores that twice. Double bacon or basil? Very good.
  • Don’t overindex on making one really good pizza. You score the lower of the two, so if you neglect one pizza, you’re going to be stuck with that score moving forward, which is hardly ideal.
  • I try to save a card with certain ingredients and the Menu Card with those ingredients, if I can, so I have an easy way to improve the score of the pizza I control. It’s a nice way to hedge your bets, but it also requires that your partner be able to join in on that plan. Sometimes they just play something to your pizza because they have to.
  • If you have a bad round, it’s salvageable, but you shouldn’t make a habit of it. Don’t just throw the rest of the game! Try to see what you can do with the next round and figure out where you messed up.
  • Try to keep an eye on what your co-player is doing. You want to be able to support their pizza, not just use it as a place to dump cards you don’t want. What ingredients are they prioritizing? What menu option have they played? Use that to influence your choices.
  • You have to get pretty lucky to score more than 10 in a round, just to help you track. Like I said, try not to do too badly round-to-round if you want to get the highest scoring tier; it’s tough to recover from a truly terrible round.
  • Try to make the best of a bad hand if you have to. Focus on getting at least some semblance of a consistent menu for your pizza and work upwards from there, I suppose.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

A board game layout featuring a pizza divided into four slices, topped with various ingredients like mushrooms, peppers, and herbs, on a red checkered tablecloth.

Pros

  • The name is either stupid or genius and I don’t care which it is. You Pizza, then you Pizza, then you Yum, and then you Yum again. You don’t even need the rules; you just need to remember the name. Of course, you Pizza two more times after that but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
  • I love pizza and pizza-themed games. I just think they’re fun themes; most people like pizza barring folks with dietary restrictions.
  • The perfect game to play while you wait for a pizza. It doesn’t take long and it very much gets you in the zone. It’s nice to see the practical applications of a theme every now and then.
  • Perfectly portable. That’s, again, the Button Shy advantage; they don’t mess around when it comes to how easy it is to bring a game or twelve with you on a trip. I actually brought, I think, twelve or so to Gen Con.
  • Quick to learn. You’re just making and scoring a pizza; it’s not that complicated.
  • I always enjoy the “lower scores” rule style. It forces players to find balance within their play, rather than just overindexing on one or getting lucky. I think that’s a nice way to build out strategy and help players learn to play well rather than just relying on luck or something.
  • The pizzas look great. The art is great in this one! Makes me hungry for pizza, unfortunately.
  • The scoring tiers are great, since you can get “Yuck Yuck”. I just think that’s a silly thing to say about a pizza.

Mehs

  • The game takes pepperoni for granted, and that saddens me to some degree. There’s no double-scoring pepperoni menu card, and as someone who likes a stuffed pepperoni pizza, that makes me sad.

Cons

  • Having an included way to track score would be nice, though it’s not critical. I just grabbed tokens from PWNED!, actually, since it was handy. I do like being able to track scores across rounds if it’s going to matter, though.

Overall: 8 / 10

Two pizzas laid out on a checkered tablecloth with various toppings represented by playing cards around them.

Overall, I think Pizza Pizza Yum Yum is great! It’s, granted, a highly situationally specific game (pretty much ideal while waiting for a pizza to cook or reheat), but there are few games that nail that level of situational specificity like Pizza Pizza Yum Yum. It’s hardly a terribly serious game, but with limited communication and information between players there’s a good amount of strategic lobbing and getting back, which can be pretty fun for folks. I like the whimsy of the title and scoring process; I think there’s a version of this that might have been relatively serious, and that seems like a bummer. I hope that everyone enjoys whimsy, I suppose. Pizza Pizza Yum Yum is still fun to play outside of pizza parlors, too, but it just works so well that I’m honestly surprised more places don’t have a copy to play while you wait. I’m a sucker for a cooperative game with a good theme, though, even if there’s no double pepperoni scoring card or a pepperoni fiend like me. If you’re looking for more pizza-themed expansions to your library (after, I assume New York slice), you like your games quick and cooperative, or you just enjoy saying “Yum Yum” like a weirdo, Pizza Pizza Yum Yum is probably great for you!

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