Oink Games have built a reputation for publishing small box games but Joking Hazard are giving them a run for their money with Sosig, which comes in a box that's barely more than half the size of a typical Oink box. Sosig is a light easy-to-play tile-placement tableau building game designed by Jason Hibbert where the 2-4 players are competing to earn points by placing out card tiles that make point-scoring sausages.
Play is super easy: you draw a sausage 'body' or 'head' tile from the market display or from the face-down draw decks and you place a tile. You'll score for all the sausages in your tableau that have at least one body tile and a head at each end . You can pick up extra points for sausages with at least two spicy tiles, and if you connect two spicy tiles you get to take an extra turn. There are bonus points too for the meatiest sausage.
Theres's more. There are order cards that give extra points for sausages that match the indicated shape and there are opportunities to pick up 'mystery meat' cards. These include 'baby sosig' cards that are worth a point at the end of the game but they also include 'take that' Burn and Chomp tiles that can be played to an opponent's tableau to reduce their scoring; only tiles that show a pastry coating are protected from being covered up by a Burn or Chomp card.
Sosig then is a fun, family game. It's visually reminiscent of other pattern-building games like Waterworks (Parker Brothers) and Tapeworm (Maestro Media/Studio71) but the order cards, in particular, give Sosig its own individual flavour. And with games taking no more than 15 minutes, it's a game where you won't have to wait long to determine the winner (or, as it says on the box, the wiener!) If you're looking for Christmas gift ideas, Sosig makes an excellent stocking filler and it's available from Amazon.co.uk