Phố Phở

In Phố Phở, players compete to earn the best reputation for their food stall by serving bowls of Phở to a line of hungry customers. This is a hand-shedding game where your goal is to skillfully play your ingredient cards while managing customer preferences to end the game with the highest reputation score. On your turn, you have three options: play cards, draw a card, or pass. To serve a customer, players collectively add ingredient cards to a central bowl. A new bowl must always start with a number 1 Noodle card. From there, players must play a card that matches the current number value or is the next highest value. A customer's order is ready to be scored once a number 5 card has been played and someone has served the Bill card for that customer. The core of the game lies in reacting to customer preferences: A Happy Moment: When a player adds an ingredient that a customer wants, every player at the table immediately flips one of their negative reputation tokens to the positive "happy face" side. An Unhappy Customer: If a player adds an ingredient a customer dislikes, the customer leaves angry right away. The bowl is discarded, and all players must flip a positive reputation token to the negative "mad face" side. Passing Your Turn: If you cannot or choose not to play a card, you must pass. When passing, you take a negative reputation token for each unique card value remaining in your hand. However, you also gain a positive reputation for each finished happy customer. A round ends when all players have passed or one player successfully plays their last card. That player is rewarded by flipping one of their tokens from negative to positive. The game continues until all customers have been served. Players then tally their positive and negative tokens, and the player with the highest net reputation wins the game. In the case of a tie, the player with the most positive tokens wins. —description from the designer