Surrealist Dinner Party Review
Surrealist Dinner Party is an action selection, asymmetric, token placement, game for 2–4 players. Highly thematic and immersive in a world of surrealist art and uptight dinner guests, players will take on the role of hosts and handlers for a group of distinguished and demanding artists. If you enjoy art, high society, and drama, Surrealist Dinner Party may be a great new light game for your group.
SarahVasa: Hey Pete, what are you doing? It’s time to get ready to go.
PeteSteele: Go where?
SarahVasa: To the dinner party that some of my artist friends are hosting.
PeteSteele: There’s not enough money in the world to get me to go to something like that.
SarahVasa: Last week you said you would be my plus one.
PeteSteele: Yeah, I don’t ever recall saying that I would be your plus one to a dinner party.
SarahVasa: You did. In fact, I have a record of you saying you would go with me in my text messages right here.
PeteSteele: Fine, I’ll go. But do I have to behave?
SarahVasa: Yes, these are nice people. You have to behave.
PeteSteele: But are they, Sarah? Are they nice people? They’re guilting you and a plus one into going to a dinner party in the year 2021.
SarahVasa: Whatever, just keep doing whatever you’re doing for a few minutes. I’m going to pick out what you’re going to wear. Also, I have cue cards with dos and don’ts with acceptable conversational topics for you. And also, no double dipping your crudités.
PeteSteele: I make no promises.
Surrealist Dinner Party (2021) is a card-based, open market game for 2-4 players that takes 30-45 minutes to play. It is designed by Mary Flanagan, Emma Hobday, and Max Seidman, and published by Resonym.
In Surrealist Dinner Party, you and fellow players are dinner guests, or the hosts, or the handlers (it’s kind of hard to tell) of a number of famous surrealist artists who are attending a dinner party . . . somewhere. But wherever it is, it’s pretty fancy. The goal is to serve your guests (the surrealist artists that you play from your hand onto the table) and accommodate each and every one of their whims and appetites, as much as you possibly can, throughout each course (round) of the game. At the end of the game, the player who wins will have the most tokens by fulfilling their guests’ appetites (and the like) by matching tokens to icons on cards, as well as by securing any appetite bonuses from various card-based abilities.
Within the Surrealist Dinner Party box, you will find 30 oversized cards representing surrealist artists printed with their art; one reflective metal serving platter; 10 faux pas cards; a host of wooden and cardboard tokens representing food, wine, dessert, compliments, drama; and multiple three- and five-unit tokens to guarantee your token supply will not run out. In addition, you get a turn overview and player aid card in the shape of a menu.
Each player starts with a hand of six cards, each representing a surrealist artist. On your turn you can take one of the following actions: 1) seat a guest at the dinner party and/or send a guest home (on your first turn you must seat a guest); 2) give compliments or start drama; 3) serve a guest wine, dessert, or food, depending on what’s available during a given course, or 4) use at least one guest’s special ability as marked on their card. The goal is to maximize meeting the appetites of your guests while minimizing the appetites of your opponents’ guests. After six courses (rounds) the game ends and points are tallied up based on how well you served your guests’ delectable morsels of gossip, compliments, food, and drink throughout the dinner party.
Surrealist Dinner Party set up for four players.
There is not very much player interaction while playing Surrealist Dinner Party. There are very few opportunities to be clever or brilliant, since the mechanics mostly consist of matching tokens to icons while leveraging special abilities every once in a while, with the hopes of getting to the end first with the most in order to attract additional bonuses. To put it another way, Surrealist Dinner Party is essentially a race to the finish line with minor bells and whistles mechanics thrown into the proverbial butter sauce.
In truth, the core mechanics of the game are not particularly compelling. For many games, this can be the first and last nail in the coffin, but in the case of Surrealist Dinner Party, while I will come back to the mechanics issue later, I am going to give this a pass for the time being. The theme, artwork, and quality of the components are so beautiful, immersive, and compelling that this game really makes me feel like I am a party planner, or handler, for some of the most elite, talented, stuck-up, arrogant, conniving, socially passive aggressive artists imaginable. When played with the right group of people who understand all of what it means to be a party planner and handler for this type of group, it’s thrilling and can feel like a decadent and salacious adventure into the world of fat cats and the social elite of the art scene. If you are simply playing Surrealist Dinner Party with a group of friends who are taking a step-by-step process of matching tokens to icons on cards for the sake of getting more icons without any interest in or feeling for the artwork or the theme, it’s probably not worth your time.
For more experienced players, the repetitive nature of the mechanics combined with the lack of innovation and player interaction mechanics is almost certainly going to be a turn off and a barrier. However, if you are interested in getting new and less experienced gamers to sit down with Surrealist-Dinner-Party-wine in hand, this may not be the worst mechanic. The game could certainly be used as a gateway game for people who are into art, or dinner parties, or dressing up in their finery for an evening out . . . or pretending to dress up in their finery . . . or actually dressing up in their finery while playing games. These elements aside, however, there are certainly better gateway games to introduce new players to.
Regarding production, the rulebook was . . . fine. I have a couple of minor nitpicky things to briefly mention, such as not having an entirely complete and itemized component list and rules being placed in slightly odd places relative to other rules. That being said, it was such a short and easy rulebook to get through, these minor things didn’t end up mattering all that much and did not particularly hamper or delay my playing of the game.
The vast majority of the components are absolutely top-notch and well-thought-out with clear and good design choices. The player aid for determining rounds comes in the form of a foldable standing menu, which I thought was quite thematic. The menu, however, does not compare to the serving tray, which holds the token pool for each round and is silver-colored polished metal. I will admit that my eyes bulged when I pulled this shiny and reflective component out of the box the first time. As unnecessary as it is, I think it is absolutely incredible. The designers could have gone with cardboard for this component, but they didn’t . . . because this game theme is all about decadence, extravagance, and luxury, and with this serving tray, they nailed it.
It is critically important to Corax & Coffee to expand the diversity of people, thoughts, voices, opinions, and production within the tabletop gaming community. Surrealist Dinner Party includes playercards and bios of real surrealist artists from a diverse background of nationalities and ethnicities. While this absolutely needs to be the new standard for all applicable tabletop games, we also do want to commend it when it is done well, and the designers behind Surrealist Dinner Party nailed it.
Surrealist artist cards
As much as I enjoyed my time with Surrealist Dinner Party, I have to be honest: the game does not have tons of replay value. You may get different experiences with multiple plays and you can play with different groups of people, but after four or five plays of the game, you will have seen everything the game has to offer.
Does that make Surrealist Dinner Party a poor value for money? Well, no. With an MSRP of $25, you can have a great experience with the game for the price of two movie tickets (does anyone remember going out to the cinema?) What’s more, this is a game you could actually play at a dinner party that you host as an icebreaker. Or at the end of the night as a wind down (and comic relief to the evening’s festivities), perhaps over digestives.
Surrealist Dinner Party is also a game you could just strategically place on your coffee table and when you have guests over they will see it and may very well say, “Oh, that looks cool. What is that?” and you can open it up, show it to them, and teach it in less than 15 minutes. Once you have played the game with a couple of your friend groups and seen everything that there is to see, this would be a game to keep on your shelf to pull down with a new friend group later, or pass it along to someone else.
While the size of the box is definitely a $25 box, the value of the art and components inside certainly kick it up to a $40 production. With all of this said, we think, even with its limited replay value, Surrealist Dinner Party is absolutely worth your time and your $25 . . . unless you just despise dinner parties, wine, lobster, six course meals, cool looking cards, the finer things in life, and high society frivolity, which would just be an odd thing. That’s like saying you just don’t like . . . music. I’m not even sure what that would mean for someone . . . moving on!
If you love the artwork in Surrealist Dinner Party (pictured) and learning about artists, but want a game that has more in-depth rules mechanics with more player interaction (or if you simply like games with cool art), I recommend Reiner Knizia’s Modern Art (1992), published by Cool Mini Or Not (now CMON Global Limited). Alternatively, if you would like to play a game where you create your own art and play with pretty components with an art-based theme, I recommend Canvas (2021), designed by Jeff Chin and Andrew Nerger and published by Road To Infamy Games. Fun fact: the Canvas game box can be hung on your wall as a piece of art (I’m not joking here, but you will need to provide your own nail for mounting it).
If Surrealist Dinner Party had low quality components, almost any other theme, or was not nearly as immersive, we may well have passed it by. But the artwork is immersive, the theme is pointed, the production is perfectly decadent, and all three of these elements are in perfect union with one another. As such, I am delighted to announce that we give Surrealist Dinner Party our Seal of Distinction along with our Cafe Approved banner.
So go out, grab a copy of Surrealist Dinner Party, put it on your display on your coffee table, invite some people over for cocktails and maybe some lobster (don’t skimp on the butter sauce), and see how the evening progresses. Also, make sure you invite a rich friend . . . maybe make them bring the lobster. A final word of advice: if you are going to spread sensational rumors about others, make sure you spread one about yourself as well to throw off suspicion.
SarahVasa: Okay, so now that the night is over, we have to discuss your behavior.
PeteSteele: What? I behaved! I didn’t discuss politics or religion, didn’t argue about their ridiculous views on economic policy, and—and this, this is what you should be most proud of—I did not dominate the conversation with boardgame talk all night.
SarahVasa: You bogarted all of the shrimp! You polished off a full bottle of wine on your own! You gave all of my friends clearly disingenuous and sarcastic compliments! You spread salacious rumors about other guests while they were in the restroom! And—and you excused yourself to go to the bathroom eleven times!
PeteSteele: Yeah, yeah, the bathroom thing. Well, I had to get away in order to take swings from my hip flask. How else could you expect me to behave so well at such an event?
SarahVasa: That was behaving well? What about all of that other stuff?
PeteSteele: Perhaps it’s best not to dwell on such minutiae.
SarahVasa: Fine. Whatever. Let’s talk about exactly how it is that you found yourself “lost” wandering around upstairs in my friend’s house.
PeteSteele: Oh, yeah, that. Well, I snuck upstairs pretending to be “lost” and found my way into your friend’s office and snooped around in their financial papers. They’re freaking loaded. Stop offering to pay for their coffee every morning. You’re welcome.
SarahVasa: SON OF A—I KNEW IT! Okay, I need you to clear your calendar next month and come with me to a company cocktail party.
PeteSteele: Buy me a new board game and we’ll talk.
Surrealist Dinner Party (2021) receives the Seal of Distinction and is Cafe Approved!