Pluto Dinerama Serves Up a Cosmic Feast of Fun for Your Party

Pluto Dinerama is a cooperative/competitive board game set in a whimsical, retro-futuristic diner in space, where two to five players compete to serve the most customers and outlast the evil, corporate rival diner. The game involves managing resources, hiring staff, and enhancing diner facilities to attract a diverse range of alien patrons. The game can take more than 60 minutes. Each round presents new challenges and opportunities as players navigate the diner’s bustling atmosphere, trying to balance speed and service quality.

We are reviewing a copy provided by the game designer. This is a prototype, pre-kickstarter version of the game. The final production version of the game may contain some differences. As of the publishing of this review, their Kickstarter has handily exceeded its funding goals.

A Unique Blend of Cooperation and Competition

The game offers various strategic elements, such as customizing menus, managing customer satisfaction, and optimizing kitchen operations. With its unique theme, engaging mechanics, and quirky artwork, Pluto Dinerama aims to provide a fun and competitive experience for board game enthusiasts and casuals alike.

It balances the strategic elements with mini-party games during the Events stage, which breaks up the gameplay and gets everyone playing the game interacting with each other. The game starts out cooperative and eventually becomes a competitive game if the Rival Diner loses. Pluto Dinerama ends when someone has seated ten Customers. Everyone can also lose to the Rival Diner if the corporate space diner seats ten customers first.

Pluto Dinerama Components and Gameplay Mechanics

The game comes with placemats for each player; this helps players track their food and ambiance scores and provides helpful reminders on what to do during their turns. It also comes with translucent cubes for various types of tracking, and a lot of cards, which have various purposes that we’ll break down for you.

You’re given five starter cards, which correspond to the color of your placemat. These provide you with all you need to get started, some food, ambiance, and a cook. In addition to the starter cards, there are supply cards, event cards, and customer cards. According to the game designers, the final version of the game will come with a physical rule book, custom pens and a receipt pad too.

Each player is dealt five cards from the supply deck. The cards in the supply deck are made up of food, ambience, cooks, and waitstaff. More waiters allow the player more actions per turn. There’s also a pool of 3 face-up cards drawn from the supply deck that is available for the players to pull from during their turn. These are called the Daily Specials.

Play in Pluto Dinerama is separated into rounds called Days. Each round consists of a Morning, Afternoon, and Night stage. During the Morning, customers line up. The number of customers that line up is equal to double the number of players plus one. So, if there are two people playing, five customers will line up every Day. If there are five players, 11 customers will line up daily. Some customers are able to be seated immediately. Some will have conditions that need to be met in order for them to take a seat at your diner.

Managing Resources and Staff

During the Afternoon, players take their actions and attempt to seat customers. Will you draw a card(s) from the Supply Cards deck or from the Daily Specials? Should you add Food or Ambience to your space diner? Will you add Cooks or Waiters? Everything you play could change the flow of the gameplay in your favor as you’re able to meet more and more conditions on the cards.

There are also additional rules detailing when players can trade and what can be traded. Players can discard cards from their hand to gain an additional action.  There are rules for retaining dinerhood and rules for moving seated customers. Once the player’s actions have been resolved, they’ll attempt to seat a Customer. If they cannot seat a customer, the customer will receive a Hangry Token. If they’re not seated during the subsequent round, then they will go to the evil Rival Diner.

Event Cards: Adding Variety and Challenge

During the evening, an Event takes place. An Event card drawn can be strategic or creative in nature, or the drawn card could be a party mini-game. Some cards might have players coming up with space puns; others might have them engaged in a round-robin thumb war. They might even get to design their own employee.

There are rewards for winning, usually in the form of an event token, and there are sometimes penalties for losing an Event. Event tokens are worth two stars and the player with the most Event tokens at the end of the game gets five additional stars.

At the end of the game, the winner will be decided by who has earned the most stars. In addition to stars earned through Events, stars can be gained through the highest Food or Ambience value. Players will add up all the stars earned through Customers seated, and then a winner will be declared. Congratulations, winner! You out dinered your friends and an ominous corporate entity.

Why Pluto Dinerama Stands Out

The instructions provided are clear and concise. Anything we were still a little confused about was cleared up by returning to the instructions and freshening up on anything we missed during our initial read. The game is well thought out. Nearly every mechanic helps to balance and keep the game fun. The rules also encourage flexibility and having a good time. They specifically mention the different Event cards types and the ability to remove any types that players find make the game too strategic or not strategic enough.

There were five strategic cards in particular for which our players thought the requirements for success were too high. They required players to sacrifice food collectively, equal to four times the number of players. The total seemed high. 2X seemed achievable as a group. 4x seemed like a high ask, and an immediate win for the Rival Diner. The Creative and Game event cards are varied and seem like a lot of fun to play through on subsequent plays of Pluto Dinerama. The game has high replayability.

Art and Design, and Print Quality

The art style on the customer cards, in particular, is cute and imaginative. There are some pop culture references peppered throughout the text of cards. If you’re not paying attention, you might miss some chuckle-worthy text or art. The color choices were great. However, perhaps it might be difficult for those who are color-blind to distinguish between them. The physical pieces of the game were well-printed and glossy but still easy to read.

Pluto Dinerama has the recipe for game night success. It’s a fun party game that has a good mix of cooperative and competitive gaming elements. The Events help diversify gameplay in a way that keeps things fresh and moving. Pluto Dinerama launched on Kickstarter on August 19th. The campaign’s goal is to bring this creative concept to life, inviting backers to join in on the cosmic culinary adventure. The game hit its 7.5k funding goal within an hour, and has since exceeded 21k USD. Those interested in playing Pluto Dinerama should head over to their Kickstarter page and follow or back it.

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Eileen Cruz

Eileen is a writer and artist based in Westchester, NY. She is also the Owner and Editor of PopGeeks. This creator of websites and human life has accomplished some things and visited some places. When not playing a terrifying amount of Breath of the Wild, she enjoys playing retro games, indie video games, a socially acceptable amount of Call of Duty, and D&D.

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