Uwe Rosenberg (designer of Bohnanza) strikes again with the silly, sneaky game of pizza making!

last update: November 20, 2004

What other game inspires players to attempt bad Italian accents and gesticulate wildly...? For me, to quote Highlander: "There can be only one."

That's right, it's yet another tricky card game from the fertile mind of Uwe Rosenberg (designer of Bohnanza, Space Beans & Klunker). This page is my attempt to compile variants & strategy hints for this most tasty of card games!

Two Player Variant

The rules as written for two players are a bit weak. Try Stephen Tavener's method... play with two sets of orders each (mixed together), and the card mix for the 4-player game. Each player takes two sets of recipes, and shuffles them together. Take out 1 of each ingredient, as in the 4-player game. After that, play is identical to the normal game.

Rules Clarification

Due to an unusual bit of wording in the Rio Grande rules, I was taught to play that you must play one or more ingredients per turn. According to Jay Tummelson and the 2nd edition rules from Abacusspiele, you may pass on playing ingredients if you are out of ingredients and simply play an order card.

The Mamma Mia Card!

If you draw the Mamma Mia card as the last card in the pile, you go short on ingredients... so says Jay Tummelson, head of Rio Grande Games!

As well, the original rules posted on the Rio Grande website were 'mistranslated'... but they are the source of an excellent variant idea for dealing with the play of the Mamma Mia card. When you draw the Mamma Mia card, you do NOT reveal it but instead leave it in your hand. It counts against your hand limit. It is revealed at the end of the round. (Thanks to Dave Arnott for pointing this out.)

Tim Watson, editor of the Strategist (newsletter of the SGS), has spent too many hours in the hot Mississippi sun - his whacked out variant idea for the Mamma Mia card uses it as a wild card. (It would make the game MUCH more random.)

Jonathan Degann, never satisfied with the simple answer when it can be made more complicated, came up with this doozy of a Dutch auction variant: Players effectively bid for the card in a Dutch auction. Here's how it works. When you draw the Mamma Mia card, as normal, you can either hold it, or play it face up on the table and replace it from the deck. It DOES count toward your hand limit - but you don't have to hold onto it if you think it's not worth it. Any player, including the player who originally drew the Mamma Mia card, can pick up the MM card as part of their regular draw. He will have the first player advantage in the next round, but loses hand capacity for the remainder of the round. It is then up to the players to decide how long they want to wait until someone finally picks it up. Of course, the longer you wait, the shorter the period of time that you forego hand capacity.

Finally, Mik Svellov puts his two kroner (or whatever they use in Denmark) in: "Who says (apart from Uwe Rosenberg) that the player with the Mamma Mia card has to begin the next round. Why not let the player with the LEAST cards in hand, or with the least number of points, begin the game (using the other criteria as a tiebreaker)?"

Strategy

While Mamma Mia may look like a simple game of card counting & luck, there's a lot more going on here than it looks like at first glance.

To start with, nothing is easy to count because, as Kevin Maroney says, of the 'cards in the hand' factor. "You can never be certain which of your opponents' pizzas will succeed unless all the ingredients are already on the table, which is less common an occurance than you might think. And once you've blown one guess, the gamestate becomes very chaotic. Now, the better you are at counting, the better you'll play, but there is no certain strategy."

So, Richard Irving offers some tactics to deal with the fluid gamestate:

1) Keep a number of orders in your hand most of the time. The number one mistake people make is not drawing enough orders. What tends to happen is they'll three of a kind in say olives, but olive or monotoni or bombastica order to play. Then you are screwed. If you are down to one order, you should draw orders rather than ingredients. The exception to this occurs near the end of the deck where you might want to draw ingredient cards to keep a maximum supply from in hand and possibly to use up the deck so that other players do not get an extra turn.

2) Don't be afraid to dump orders in the first or second decks. You get them back by the third deck. You dump orders you don't think you'll need at the moment, so you can draw an extra ingredient. Hopefully the extra ingredient will make possible the orders you keep. It is also surprising how often this wasted order will actually score.

3) If you are going to dump, don't be afraid to play a similar order to another player. If he misses, you are ready to pick up the pieces. They assume he was going to make it--but since you are dumping the order anyway, if you miss it no big loss.

4) Try to remember only orders played early in the deck (because only then are you positive about what you'll need.) where you know you are missing a card--so you know what to keep. If you do acquire these cards, hold on to them. This is only thing I really try to remember long term.

5) Pay attention to what people play over the last round (anything before that is just too hard to predict). If the table plays olive, mushrooms, peppers--play a salami and combination pizza. If a player plays two mushrooms and no order, play a mushroom or two and mushroom pizza.

And Stephen Tavener chimes in with his thoughts on how to win:

1) There are no penalties for failing to complete an order, so if you get an order you're unlikely to complete this round, stick it on the pile! It'll confuse the enemy (who will have to assume that you have a fair chance at completing it with the cards in your hand, and the next recipe you draw will be better.

2) Card counting *is* important, though there's some randomness from the joker cards, and whether the recipes will actually succeed.

3) Try to make sure you have a couple of recipes in your hand at the beginning of the second and third rounds... you're in a very good position to cash in on the open information - the beginning of the round is probably the best time to ditch the [3 of the least] recipe... all you need to do is accumulate 3 ingredients of the appropriate type by the end of the round.

4) Above all, it's a game of brinksmanship; the time to play your recipe card is not when all the ingredients are on the table, but when you have a good chance to fill in the gaps at the end of the round. Remember, you only need to make 2+2/3 recipes per round!

And Aaron Fuegi adds:

All of Stephen's comments are important and true but PARTICULARLY number one. For example, if I get the 15+ pie as my opening pizza, 95%+ of the time I will play it on my first turn with no hope of filling it just to get rid of it (and try for it in a later round). Unlike what Paul said, I think it is a big advantage (except at the end of the round where you want ingredients to fill partial orders during the pizza-making phase) to have lots of pizzas in your hand and just lay them down and hope they might work. I have seen a player play all 8 of his pizzas in the first round. Sure, he only made a few but playing them cost him nothing and actually gained him something - if he is carefully paying attention he now knows the order of all the pizzas in his pizza stack as the ones not made are always put on the bottom and these are not reshuffled.

And if you're feeling like a statistician, Joe Huber's done some math for you:

Between games, we determined that at a minimum it takes 5 ingrediants to fill all 8 orders. So..

Note that this is the theoretical _maximum_ number of ingredients available, and the theoretical _minimum_ number of ingredients needed to fill all orders.

The problem is that you assume every player uses every ingredient in their hands at the end of every round. If you assume 2 cards/player average (which is probably low) are left over your table looks like this:

Richard (Vickery, I think) responds to Joe's math:

The interesting thing to note from the chart is that it's MORE difficult to fill orders with more players. (I will note that 2 cards/player/round fits in well with my experience. There is also a shortage of ingredients used in each round - usually around 8/round in my experience - which also needs to be calculated in.)

Well, there... now that you're totally overwhelmed - go try some of these strategy tips for yourself!

Departures

Here's a quartet of reviews of Mamma Mia:

BoardgameGeek entry for Mamma Mia

Dan Becker's Home Page by (who else?!) Dan Becker

The Game Report Online by Peter Sarrett

Pevans by Paul Evans

Ideal Game Library by Bruno Faidutti