You also score five points for each objective you were the first to complete, and this is indicated on the bottom of the card for an easy reminder. What’s On The Specials Board? FOOD & POTION MINIATURES: Serve 4 types of mini food tokens, plus a potion token that convinces patrons to love their food. Play a potion token on a Hero card and earn a Perfect Match bonus Action cards allow players to take special moves with their test subjects, or to position other thematic items — like the Portal turret and the Companion Cube — around the board. It's a fast-paced game that evokes all the humor that made the Portal series so successful. The game draws on Valve's body of tutorial and in-game artwork, and the game box itself is printed to look like it's been sitting in forgotten corner of Aperture Laboratories for decades. Play essentially continues like this until both end spaces of the table have food tokens on. The player that triggers the end game finishes their turn, and every other player has final turn, where they must take an action if possible, even if it would be detrimental to their score. So How Do You Score?

Using an Aperture card, you should play your optional action before the rest of your actions in a single turn. After the players play the instruction from the Aperture card, these are flipped and discarded. This gives the players an effect. The game ends when any one player has lost all of their test subjects. At that point, each player totals the amount of cake that they have inside the lab's rooms, and the one with the most cake wins. How do you get cake? By activating chambers, of course.As I’ve said, scoring points is essentially done through a pattern matching game, but the main core mechanism you’ll be using to take turns is action selection. Each player has four tiles that correspond to one of the four different types of food. Red is your classic Smoked Ham, green is Vegetable Platter, yellow is Tankard of Ale and blue is a delicious looking plate of Quippers and Chips.

There are a few things I really like here. First and foremost is how tactile the game is. Each of the four food types has its own molded pieces which feel great when you’re playing them and look fab set out on the table. Similarly, the five types of gems are all different shapes and sizes, and they’re all pretty chunky so have a great feel in your hand. Helpfully the actions on the reverse are shown with small icons at the bottom so you’ll always know what’s next. An equal assortment of each food token is placed in the most central slot positions on the board at the start of the game, and each time a food token is placed by a player, it can only be done so adjacent to one already on the board. The number of starting food tokens, and the length of the actual board itself, scale up in relation to the number of players, from one to four.

The artwork is beautiful, the components are great – with the exception of the map tiles. They're too thin, too fiddly. But man – seeing the whole laboratory move and change, that's just wonderful.