For me, 1980s buffets in the Midwest U.S. included Pizza Hut, Golden Corral, and Ryan’s. The goal? Eat a sickening amount of mediocre food to “get the most for your money,” including that second trip to the ice cream machine.
Scoffton captures the disgusting nostalgia of the all-you-can-eat restaurants of yesteryear. Designed by Marcus Finlay and Gavin Vance, with art by Len Peralta and Jonathan Calleja, Scoffton plays 2-4 players in about 60 minutes. Players are patrons at Scoffton All You Can Eat, and each diner’s goal is to earn the most Value for Money (i.e., Victory Points) at the end of their meal.
Underneath the theme, Scoffton is a basic worker placement game, with each player controlling three workers and a blocker. The Manager cards introduce a little chaos between worker placement and activation, and a couple fun elements (Lost and Found and a Claw Machine) add alternate scoring possibilities.
With the right group who are into the theme, Scoffton’s gags will induce laughter and fun memories, and the solid mechanisms make it more than “just” a humor-focused game.
Colorblind Accessibility
Meeple colors weren’t great for me. I cannot readily distinguish or identify the two different colors in the image below.
I played a 2-player game for this review, so I selected two colors I could distinguish quite easily – I think they were yellow/orange and blue-ish. At lower player counts, meeple colors probably won’t be an issue, but if you’re playing with four I recommend a modification or swap-out using your own components.
Board, tiles, currency. Besides the meeple colors that could cause issues for me at 3-4 players, I had no color vision issues with any other components. The food items are easy to identify, and scoring uses simple dots on the tiles and victory points are tracked with chalkboard-style numbered tiles.
The victory point tiles were only printed on one side (the other was a stylized background), but I didn’t see a situation where having them face-down would be useful. This resulted in some annoyance, flipping some over to see their number.
Interestingly, this is the first time I’ve seen currency in every denomination, 1 through 8. So instead of finding the “5” and two “1s” to get to 7 points, I just grabbed the 7-point VP token. I liked it a lot and would like to see it used more often.
Scoffton is a silly but not-simple worker placement game with a fun theme, and colorblind players should be able to navigate it without help.
You can learn about Scoffton’s availability from at the Vamoose Co website.
Colorblind Games received a complementary copy of Scoffton from the publisher for this review.
Colorblind Games 