Brush off your best Italian accents and sharpen your memory for this Uwe “Bohnanza” Rosenberg card game of pizza-making brinksmanship.
Players start with hands of six toppings and one order. On each turn a player must play one or more of the same topping to a central pile, and may optionally add an order. He then replenishes his hand from either the common topping deck or his own personal order deck, but not both. This continues until the last topping card is drawn, signaling the end of phase one.
For phase two the pile built during phase one is inverted and turned up one by one, sorting the cards into piles by topping until an order comes up. Each order shows a set of toppings needed for a pizza. If that set of toppings is showing on the table, they’re discarded and the order’s owner (they’re color-coded) scores a point. If all the toppings aren’t showing, the owner can add missing toppings from his hand and still score. Otherwise the order goes back under that player’s personal order deck, the ingredients remain on the table, and the sorting resumes. Leftover toppings when the pile is exhausted remain for the next round, and used toppings are shuffled into a new deck. High score after three rounds wins.
On the surface this is a game about remembering what toppings have been played and adding the right toppings and orders to score points. But it’s not quite that simple. Suppose purple plays two pepperoni and a pepperoni pizza order requiring four pepperoni and an olive. You’ve got a couple of pepperoni and a pepperoni order of your own in your hand. Do you play it, hoping that purple won’t have the two additional pepperoni he needs at the end of the round?
Some of the orders can be filled in multiple ways. The minimale requires three of whichever topping has the smallest stack on the table. If there’s a tie for smallest, the owner can choose- potentially screwing up an order later down the road. The monotoni requires six of any one topping. And the bombastica requires any fifteen ingredients. A successfully-made bombastica clears the table of all toppings, even those in excess of fifteen, invariably to groans of dismay from the other players as they see toppings they’d been counting on for later orders disappear.
Mamma Mia! is simply fun to play, although much of that fun is created by the players themselves. Cheesy accents aren’t required by the rules, but they add a certain quality that shouldn’t be discounted. With possible scores ranging only from one to eight, this isn’t a game for intense competition. It’s designed for silliness, banter, a dash of role-playing, and good clean fun.