The Great Evening Banquet Review – Fine dining with Saashi

Have you ever had to arrange a seating plan for an event? It doesn’t have to be anything as grand as a 200-person wedding reception, even something as simple as seating Christmas Dinner can be a nightmare. The kids can’t sit together because they’ll bicker. Aunt Susan recently got divorced so will be all over any single men. Celeste can’t sit with her back to the window, and Grandpa smells. So how do you arrange the seating so that everyone is happy? Saashi & Saashi have taken the concept with The Great Evening Banquet and turned it into a game, and a clever one at that. Fans of games like Come Sail Away (read my review here) should read on.

Despite not leaning on the same core Mancala mechanism of Come Sail Away, The Great Evening Banquet feels immediately familiar. Each player has six VIP tables to fill, each with space for four guests. In each round, carriages arrive at the banquet, which are cards with a number of guest tokens on them. You claim one, then try to find somewhere for them to sit.

🎵 Sit down next to me 🎵

Any James fans? Finding the ideal seat around a table is a tricky thing in The Great Evening Banquet. You need to consider who is already around the table, and also which row and column the table is in. If you want to score well, you need to pay attention to the table tile. It might want two of the same kind of guest, or a certain number of raised glasses. If you manage to fulfil those requirements, you score well.

On top of the individual tables, however, you also need to pay attention to the final photograph at the end of the game. Each row and column has an additional set of requirements, and if the guests they line up with meet those requirements, you’ll score even more VPs.

It’s a lovely concept which is easy to explain, and feels pretty light the first time you play it. New players will have a great time just trying to get the correct people around each table, and the scoring is well-tuned so that even if someone more experienced manages to complete more objectives, there still won’t be a massive gulf between the players’ final scores.

That’s an important thing in a game like The Great Evening Banquet. Takako Takarai’s artwork is so charming and so innocent that Saashi & Saashi’s games exude a newbie-friendly vibe. The games really need to fulfil that initial box-opening promise of ‘Here’s a game you can play with your family’, and this is another game that does exactly that.

To cover up a Lacerda-weight game like On Mars (read my On Mars review here) with the same graphic design would mess with my head so much. Now that I see it in writing, though, I really want to see it happen…

Don’t forget the geeks

Funny story. In my ongoing quest to learn Japanese I made a mistake in a lesson where I mixed up すわれる (suwareru – to sit) and わすれる (wasureru – to forget), something which I have unironically never forgotten. Saashi & Saashi haven’t forgotten either, if the question is ‘Will fans of heavier games enjoy it too?’

The placement puzzle tickles your brain in a nice way, to be sure, but if you come into it expecting Nucleum (Nucleum is great, read my review here) levels of mind-bending mental gymnastics, you might be disappointed. Saashi saw fit to include an expert rule variant, though, which doesn’t do anything drastically different, but changes the game up enough to give you a proper problem to think about.

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The expert mode introduces a new table layout where some chairs are shared between tables. Believe me when I tell you that this makes things a lot harder. The guests sitting in those shared corner seats have to be placed perfectly, or you mess up scoring on multiple tables at once.

Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t suddenly jump the game’s weight from around a 2/5 to a 4/5, but it’s enough to keep puzzle experts on their toes. If you enjoy the puzzle enough to want to play more of it when there’s nobody else around, they’ve also included a full solo mode, which is a great way to practice when you’ve got a quiet hour to kill with your own company.

Final thoughts

The Great Evening Banquet is yet another example of Saashi & Saashi really nailing what it is they set out to do with their games. They don’t make heavy games. They don’t make games which take hours to play. They make lightweight games with clever, engaging rules, beautiful, charming artwork, and enough of a gameplay hook to make you want to come back for more.

I’ve lost count of how many groups I’ve taught 1 A.M. Jailbreak to (another review for you to read here), or Bus & Stop, and The Great Evening Banquet is another which gets thrown in my bag when I go to local café games nights. When you want to grab the attention and hearts of people new to the hobby, this is exactly how you do it.

Heavy games fans aren’t going to set it up for a night with their heavy game nerd friends, and that’s okay. Not every game is for every group. But if you’ve got the sort of group that likes games like Harmonies, Azul, Calico, or Barenpark, you’ll have a great time with The Great Evening Banquet. Getting hold of it is the hard part, in the UK at least. You can order direct from their website, or check out bigger conventions or specialist game importers like Travel Games.

Pros & Cons