Thrift Treasure: Ramen Fury Card Game
I’ve seen this week’s thrift treasure on retailers’ shelves for quite some time. Who can miss the perfectly themed packaging of Ramen Fury? Designed to look like an inexpensive serving of Maruchan Ramen Noodles, this card game would get lost if placed in the grocery aisle.
I knew it would only be a matter of time until a copy showed up at thrift at a discount. This one set us back only $1.88 – much less than the $11.99 MSRP. Ramen Fury is a card game about building the perfect bowl of ramen. Not the instant kind, but the type you’d find at your favorite noodle shop. Yum.
Inside the box bag are ten spoon tokens, fifteen ramen bowl cards and eighty-nine ingredient cards. Give each player three ramen bowl cards and two spoon tokens. Place the ramen bowl cards in a row, noodle side up. The deck of ingredient cards is shuffled and three are dealt to each person (Ramen Fury supports up to five players). This forms the players’ starting hand and should be kept secret from other players. The remaining ingredient cards are placed in the center of the table to form a draw deck. Four are revealed and placed in a row face-up next to the deck. This area is called “the pantry”.
Beginning with the person to have last eaten ramen, each player in turn order will perform two of six available actions, or one action twice, in any order. The first, prep, allows you to place any one ingredient from your hand onto one of your bowls. They are placed on top of other ingredients already in the bowl and you may never have more than five ingredients, nor more than one flavor ingredient, in them.
Draw allows you to take a face-up card from the pantry and place it into your hand. Immediately replace the card in the pantry with a new one from the deck. There is also a hand limit of five cards, so if you have more, you must immediately discard down to the allowed amount. The spoon action costs one of your spoons to be discarded and then you may take the top ingredient from any bowl belonging to another player, including your own. This card is placed into your hand or on top of one of your bowls.
If you wish to clear the pantry and get new cards, take the restock action. Immediately refill the pantry with four new cards from the deck. If you are unhappy with how your bowl is looking, you may use an action to empty it, leaving you with the original bowl you began with. Lastly, you can eat the ramen in your bowl. Flip over the bowl and any ingredients inside of it. A bowl must have one flavor ingredient and one other ingredient in it before it may be eaten. Once eaten, no more ingredients may be placed in it, nor can any be taken.
In addition to regular ingredients in Ramen Fury, there are two types of garnishes which also may be added to a bowl. When either chili peppers or nori garnish is drawn, it is immediately placed into a bowl of your choice, yours, or an opponent’s. If they are in your hand, as a free action, you may place them in a bowl on your turn. Chili peppers are negative points at the end of a game, unless they are in a bowl flavored with Fury. Nori garnish is used to make any bowl more colorful and delicious. They add a point to the value of a bowl you have eaten.
A game of Ramen Fury ends once any player has eaten their third bowl of ramen or when the ingredient deck is empty. All other players get one last turn before proceeding to scoring. The flavor of the bowl determines the scoring type. For instance, a shrimp flavor awards four points for each set of vegetable and protein ingredients, while beef flavor bowls award for how many different protein ingredients they have. Add the value of each of your eaten bowls and the person with the highest total wins Ramen Fury!
You can find Ramen Fury at many big box retailers or on Amazon. Or wait to find it at thrift for a couple bucks!
Do you like playing food-themed games?
This looks like a simple and fun vacation game!