Wouter & Ymke 
There’s something slightly dangerous about an all-you-can-eat buffet. You arrive telling yourself you’ll be sensible, and twenty minutes later you’re carrying a plate that somehow contains salmon, cake, fruit and something covered in ketchup. All You Can Eat Buffet takes that familiar lack of restraint and turns it into a card game where everyone is reaching for the same food.
All You Can Eat Buffet is one of the games Mojito Studios is bringing to Spiel Essen this October. You’ll be collecting meat, vegetables, fish, fruit and cake, but getting the food you want isn’t as simple as choosing it. Each round, everyone secretly picks a mood that determines how they’ll approach the buffet. Those moods are revealed together, and that’s usually when you discover somebody else had plans for your dinner. Add drinks, spices and several foods with scoring rules of their own, and there’s quite a bit happening around this little buffet table.
👥 3-6 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designers: Bruno Faidutti & Théo Rivière
🎨 Artwork: Anna Meshchanova
🏢 Publisher: Mojito Studios (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
At the centre of the game is a line of meal cards representing the buffet. Depending on the number of players, five to seven meals are placed in a row. Everyone also has their own deck of mood cards and starts with a small hand of them. Each round, you secretly choose a mood from your hand and place it face down. Once everyone has chosen, all moods are revealed together.
Your mood determines what you’ll do at the buffet. Hungry takes the first meal in line, for example, while Picky takes the second. Very Hungry takes the first two, Trickster swaps two adjacent meals before taking the first, and some of the other moods change when you act or let you interfere with another player. These effects are normally resolved in turn order, starting with the first player.
If two or more players have chosen the same mood, they clink glasses and each take a drink token. Drinks are worth points at the end of the game, although collecting too many starts interfering with your mood choices. Depending on the player count and how many drinks you have, you may have to put down two moods and let the player to your left randomly choose one. Collect even more and they may choose a random mood directly from your hand.
Meals you collect stay face up in front of you. Some come with spice tokens, which you take together with the card, and several foods have additional effects. Coffee makes you discard two drink tokens, while milk, lemon, parsley and ketchup change how particular cards or tokens score. Cakes have their own shared birthday cake tile worth eight points. Whenever someone collects or steals another cake, that tile moves to them, so whoever takes the last cake ends up with the bonus.
The food itself scores in several different ways. Meat and vegetables have values printed on their cards, and whoever has the most vegetables receives another ten points. Fish are worth three points each, except that the player or players with the most fish score none of them. Fruit scores in sets of different types, and a tomato can count as either a fruit or a vegetable at the end. There are also negative cards and foods that change the value of other things you’ve collected.
After everyone has resolved their mood, each player draws another mood card, leftover meals are discarded, and the first-player tile passes clockwise. A fresh buffet is laid out and you do it all again. The game ends after ten rounds, or nine with five or six players. Drinks are normally worth one point each, while spices score one point each up to five. If you collect six or more, they score nothing unless you have milk, which raises that limit to eight. Add everything together and the player with the most points wins.
Artwork & Components
Most of All You Can Eat Buffet is cards. There are 84 meal cards and 72 mood cards, and both are very colourful. Anna Meshchanova’s food illustrations take up most of each meal card, with the scoring information kept towards the edges. The different food groups also have their own colours, which helps when several collections are spread across the table.
I think the mood cards are my favourite part visually. Each player gets the same set in their own colour, with characters showing the different moods. The expressions are exaggerated without making the cards difficult to read. After a round or two, we barely needed to look at the text on the moods we already knew.
The meal cards form the buffet across the table, with cardboard Salt and Pepper pieces marking the first player and start of the line. There’s also a large birthday cake tile, plus small wooden drink and spice tokens. I liked the standing cardboard pieces more than I expected. They don’t do much, but without them it would mostly be a row of cards and piles of food in front of everyone.
Our Experience
Our first game was mostly spent trying to work out what everyone else was going to choose. We’d look at the buffet, look at another player’s collection and decide their next move was completely obvious.
Then the moods came up, and we were wrong surprisingly often. Sometimes very wrong. There were several immediate complaints of “I wanted that!”, usually followed by the offending player happily adding the card to their collection. Every now and then we did predict somebody correctly, which of course made us far too confident about doing it again next round.
We also made the fairly predictable mistake of looking at individual cards too much. A three-point fish sitting in the buffet looks useful, so taking another one seemed perfectly reasonable. Then someone ended up with the most fish and realised their growing seafood collection was now worth precisely nothing. Vegetables started disappearing more quickly once somebody got close to the majority bonus, while fruit we’d ignored earlier suddenly mattered when somebody needed one more type. Before long, we weren’t only checking what a card would give us. We were checking the plates around the table as well.
Our mood choices changed too. Initially, we usually picked whichever one could get us the exact meal we wanted. Quite a few of those plans lasted until someone before us took the card. Or moved it. Or did something else we hadn’t considered. After a few games, we became much less attached to getting one particular meal. If two or three possible outcomes looked fine, that was good enough.
The drinks caused some of the funniest disagreements. Early on, matching somebody else’s mood feels like a nice little bonus because you both get another point. Later, someone has enough drinks that another player gets involved in choosing their mood. We had moments where somebody desperately wanted one of their two cards and then watched the other one get picked. There was usually a short discussion about how “random” that selection really was. I mean, apparently choosing the card on the left can be suspicious.
And then there was the greed. Five spices? Great. That sixth one suddenly becomes a problem unless you’ve found the milk. Another fish might score three points, or it might push you into a lead you absolutely don’t want. The birthday cake sat proudly in front of someone until another cake appeared and immediately changed hands. Our plates rarely looked like what we’d intended to collect at the beginning. By the end they were usually a mixture of things we’d wanted, things we’d settled for and at least one thing we probably should have left at the buffet.
Our Thoughts
I think the hidden mood choices are the part that makes All You Can Eat Buffet work for us. Some of the uncertainty comes from which meals appear and which moods reach your hand, but quite often the unpredictable part is simply the person sitting across from you. Most of the information is right there. You can see the buffet, everyone’s food and who acts first. You might even know exactly which fish or vegetable another player wants. What you don’t know is which mood they’ve picked.
Of course, that won’t always be fun for everyone. You can read the table correctly and still end up without the meal you wanted because someone acts before you, moves something or simply chooses a mood you didn’t expect. Drinks take that further because eventually another player gets some control over which mood you use. We were fine with it. Mostly. If you want a good read of the table to produce a fairly reliable result, this game doesn’t always give you that. Sometimes your plan disappears and you’re choosing from whatever food is still sitting there.
There’s also more to remember than the colourful food theme initially suggests. Choosing and revealing a mood is easy enough, then you have the individual mood effects, fish penalty, vegetable majority, fruit sets, spice limit and several foods that change scoring. None of it is particularly difficult. There’s just quite a bit of it during that first game. The simultaneous reveal also makes the game sound faster than it sometimes is, since the moods are resolved afterwards. With more players, you can end up waiting while the buffet changes before it finally reaches you.
After a few plays, you know most of what the system is going to do. I don’t think there’s some completely different game hiding underneath once you’ve played it ten times. The moods stay the same. The food scores the same way. What changes is which cards appear together and, more importantly, who you’re playing with. That mattered more than player count for us. Once we’d played together a few times, we started recognising each other’s habits. Then someone realises they’re becoming predictable and does exactly the opposite. So much for knowing your friends.
For us, All You Can Eat Buffet is the kind of game I’d bring out when we’d rather interfere with each other’s dinner than spend the evening building something in our own corner of the table. I can see families and casual groups getting into it, as well as experienced players who sometimes want something lighter and don’t mind their plans being messed with.
We ended up enjoying it more than our first game suggested. Once we stopped caring quite so much about getting exactly what we wanted, the whole thing became easier to enjoy. Our plates got messy, people stole the food we wanted, somebody inevitably collected one drink too many, and we had a good time with it. I’d happily play it again with the right group. Just don’t believe anyone who says they don’t want the last piece of cake.
📝 We received a copy of All You Can Eat Buffet from Mojito Studios.
Going to Spiel Essen ’26? You can find All You Can Eat Buffet at Mojito Studios in Hall 3, booth N120.
You can also find all of our pre-Spiel ’26 coverage here.
