If you live in Asia or have visited fruit stores there you may be familiar with the fruit Durian. It's a fruit that's infamous for its pungent smell: so offensive to some that guests are expressly banned from bringing it into many hotels. Don't worry tho', this small-box game designed by Masato Uesugi certainly doesn't stink.
The players are all staff in a jungle greengrocers. Players will each have a card in front of them on a small wooden stand but it's positioned so that each player can only see the reverse of their own card. That means, as in Hanabi (Abacusspiele) and Letter Jam (CGE), players know what's on everyone else's cards but they don't know what's on their own. The cards all show two different fruits tho' the quantities on each card vary (1-3), and the cards on all the stands represent the store's inventory.
The draw pile represents orders. Players take turns flipping a card and they decide which of the two fruit orders on the card will be met. The orders are cumulative so as more order cards are flipped it may be increasingly difficult to be sure you haven't exceeded the inventory. And as a spanner in the works, when one of the three Gorilla cards come up they mischievously switch one of the order cards around...
If at any point you think the orders that have been accepted exceed the inventory, you forego flipping a card and instead ring the bell to call the manager. All the players' cards are revealed. If the orders can all be fulfilled then the player who called the manager loses the round. If the orders exceed the inventory, the player who took the last order loses the round, even if it wasn't actually them who caused the inventory to be exceeded. Oh, and if a gorilla card is showing on another player's inventory card, it will either negate all fruit cards showing three fruit, negate all banana orders or have no effect at all - depending on which gorilla card it is.
This all makes for a fun, fast, easy-to-play, push-your-luck deduction game. Tho' Durian is notionally playable with just two or three players, it's definitely at its best at higher player counts. With six or seven players you can feel the excitement mount along with the orders. If the player before me has accepted an order that exceeds the fruit supply I can see, does it mean the order can be met with the help of the card I have in front of me or is that player just bluffing...
And, as is typical from Oink Games, the publisher hasn't skimped on the components in this still pocket-sized box. The art is by Hiroko Izumida and the game comes complete with seven wooden card stands and even a little bell to help to animate the 'call the manager' action! Durian is distributed in the UK by Hachette Boardgames.
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