Doughnut Drive-Thru Review – Squeezing Every Drop Out of a Simple Ruleset

In board gaming, we often talk about gateway games – games that welcome new users into the world of meeples and dice rolling. Doughnut Drive-Thru is a perfect example of one of these games with its cute (and delicious-looking) artwork and not-so-serious gameplay.

You play as competing bakeries selling mouthwatering doughnut flavours like peanut butter & bacon crunch, pistachio cluster bomb, and honey matcha. To win, you must sell your sweet treats and earn the most money.

How to play

Before you can sell your sugary circles, you must go through Doughnut Drive-Thru’s patented three-step process. First, you learn a new recipe by drawing two cards from the doughnut deck and keeping one. Then you prepare the recipe by rolling a die and beating the doughnut’s prepare value. Before finally serving it to a customer. Similar to the prepare action, you must roll a die and beat the serve value to be successful.

Each of these steps is represented by cards. As part of your turn, you will place doughnut tokens on these cards to perform the action. There are a strict number of spaces on each card. So if you can’t take one of the actions, or don’t want to, then you can instead take two doughnut tokens from any card. Saving them for later use.

Now you’d be a poor bakery if you relied so heavily on the roll of the die. So there are a couple of ways to swing luck in your favour. One way is to place two doughnut tokens on an action card instead of one. This gives your die roll a +1 value. Making it easier for you to roll the number you need.

Alternatively, you can use already-served doughnuts. After being served, your doughnuts become a resource you can be spent to increase the value of your dice rolls. They are one-time use but can be recharged by taking the Coffee Break action.

Continue taking turns placing doughnut tokens and making doughnuts until one player has served six. At that point, everyone gets one more turn before counting the money earned and finding out who won.

Not your typical worker placement game

The design of Doughnut Drive-Thru embodies the same philosophies as other Japanese-designed games like Love Letter and Deep Sea Adventure. Where, although it doesn’t have a complex ruleset, each and every rule is squeezed for all of its juices.

One example of this is the limited spaces on the action cards. By itself, it’s nothing novel. But when combined with the ability to place one or two tokens on each card, suddenly your brain fills with possibilities.

You now have to think if it’s worth paying that extra doughnut token, or worth risking it on a plain die roll. Alternatively, you can fill up an action card to stop your opponent from taking that action or just enough that they can’t play two tokens to the card.

In our plays of Doughnut Drive-Thru, I was always conscious of what my opponents wanted to do and planned accordingly. Choosing between slowing them down or focusing on my doughnuts, was a fun and engaging decision.

This is not typical of your usual worker placement game which focuses on long-term strategy. However, this type of interaction unlocked a surprising amount of tactical nuance for a game about ridiculously cute-looking doughnuts.

In saying that, Doughnut Drive-Thru stops itself short of being a full-on strategy game by introducing dice as a determining factor. Given the randomness of the rolls, you never know what’s going to happen. Providing newcomers with a chance against seasoned professionals with a series of great dice rolls.

While winning and losing by dice rolls can be frustrating if taken too seriously, one look at those silly, smiling doughnuts should shock you into remembering you’re here for fun, not competition.

Otherwise, there’s not much more to explore in Doughnut Drive-Thru. It’s a pleasant game, one I’d be happy to play any time it’s suggested. It works well as an introduction to worker placement and board games in general. Not to mention the interaction of placing and picking up doughnut tokens, and the spontaneity of dice rolls keeps the game from getting overly stale after a couple of plays.

So if you’re looking for a simple, sweet game about doughnuts then be sure to check out Doughnut Drive-Thru.