Stir Fry Eighteen card game a successful recipe for S.A. company

The food-themed card game Stir Fry Eighteen is a hit for Yanaguana Games out of San Antonio, which debuted it at the 2016 PAX South gaming festival. The food-themed card game Stir Fry Eighteen is a hit for Yanaguana Games out of San Antonio, which debuted it at the 2016 PAX South gaming festival. Photo: Courtesy Yanaguana Games Photo: Courtesy Yanaguana Games Image 1 of / 11 Caption Close Stir Fry Eighteen card game a successful recipe for S.A. company 1 / 11 Back to Gallery

Card game developers spend months fine-tuning even the simplest play mechanics, let alone card art. San Antonio native Marshall Britt had Stir Fry Eighteen ready to wok, er, rock in about a week.

And talk about your winning recipe. The bluffing card game with the Chinese takeout box aesthetic is now on its third printing, having sold out its debut run at last year’s PAX South gaming festival in San Antonio and its second run through subsequent conventions and retailers.

“Everybody enjoys the food theme,” said Britt, a freelance graphic artist and web developer who now lives in Providence, Rhode Island. “A food theme around a fun game just tended to work.”

Especially when you spice it up with a little gamesmanship.

In Stir Fry Eighteen, players lie and vie for the highest-scoring hand as they combine ginger, green onion and other stir fry ingredient cards with a must-have noodles card from a deck of only 18 cards. Players draw new cards by discarding, face-down, pairs of matching ingredients or so-called “protein cards” of chicken, pork or shrimp.

That’s where the bluffing comes in. Maybe you or your opponent wants to pass off false ingredients, like mushrooms and soy sauce cards for a pair. You can call that bluff with a “Taste Test” to reveal those cards. Catch a liar and you get more cards. (Sweet!) But make a wrong accusation and you lose all your cards. (Sour!)

The first player to 50 points wins the game, which usually lasts five to 15 minutes — about as long as it takes to whip up a real stir fry.

Britt publishes the $10 card game through Yanaguana Games, which he co-founded with fellow tabletop gaming enthusiast Alexander Clifford in San Antonio after the first PAX South in 2015. Britt now runs Yanaguana with game development lead Andrew Toth in San Antonio.

Britt came up with Stir Fry Eighteen in late 2015 for a BoardGameGeek “microgame” contest, which challenged designers to create a game using 18 cards and a half-sheet of paper for the rules, no dice or other components allowed. Britt and his wife Courtney were deep into Asian cooking at the time, so the idea of shuffling stir fry ingredients for fun kind of stuck.

Britt built and play-tested Stir Fry Eighteen in just around one week. Happy with the results, he and his Yanguana partners decided to skip the BoardGameGeek contest and print the game themselves in just two months to premiere it at last year’s PAX South. By the end of the expo, attendees had gobbled up all 100 packs of that first printing.

“It let us know that we were doing the right thing,” Britt said.

Yanaguana also has a pirate-quest card game called Shipload O’ Gold, and is developing a guitar-themed board game called Re-Chord, which incorporates guitar picks on a “fret” game board. But after selling out a larger second print run of Stir Fry Eighteen, as well as another 100 or so packs in its third printing, the food game remains Yanaguana’s best-seller.

The reasons why are as varied as its pictured ingredients. Britt said Stir Fry’s compact design makes it a fun game-on-the-go that fits in a pocket or purse. It’s for ages 6 and older, so it helps kids learn math, too, Toth said. And its fast play ensures general audiences as well as tabletop geeks can get in a quick game.

Of course there’s also something irresistible about a game whose rules encourage players to break them.

“We found that people really seem to enjoy lying to people,” Toth said.