Night Market: Preparing and Selling Signature Solo Dishes
Collect ingredients, expand stalls, and prepare delicious dishes to serve to visiting customers across the seasons in Night Market.
There was a time when I wasn’t sure if Night Market would be delivered, and it turned out to be one of my most delayed games. Yet it arrived! With tons of expansions and components, I was interested to see what this solo mode would offer up. I approached it cautiously, yet hoped to find a hidden treasure within this somewhat dated new arrival. To the market!
Game Overview
Game Name: Night Market
Publication Year: 2025
Designer: Adam Zwain
Artists: James Churchill & Jason Washburn
Publisher: Talon Strikes Studios
Solo Mode: Included in Night Market: Mini-Mart Expansion
The idea is to collect ingredients and prepare stalls during the day, then cook everything up to sell to customers at night. Lots to think about! It isn’t overly complicated with a clear process, and the solo opponent competes in a very different way… Which can be a challenge to understand.
First Play
March 16, 2025
Complexity
3
Latest Play
March 16, 2025
Expansions
5
Setup Time
20 Minutes
Lifetime Plays
1
Play Time
1 Hour & 30 Minutes
High Score
N/A
Game Area
46" x 34"
Low Score
N/A
Why Is This So Huge?!
Organizing everything took ages, and then setup threw me for a loop. This is enormous! I physically had to stand up to reach a few tiles near the very top, which was annoying.
My goodness. Oversized cards didn’t add anything but table space. The solo opponent’s completely separate play area on the bottom right took up more space than my area.
But I was still willing to give it a chance. After all, the idea of running food stalls was the reason I wanted it… In 2021.
Unnecessarily large components were just a lot to handle. And the setup instructions were cumbersome… At best.
Hints of Good Ideas
Let me be very clear and say that there are some clever ideas within the design, and the game was certainly developed. Different phases, spatial puzzles, and strategies were there.
I’ll also break off for a moment and say that I played it with my husband, and it was actually pretty good! He likes it enough to want to keep it, which should say something.
I wasn’t so convinced, mostly because this solo experience was one of the worst I’ve seen in many, many years.
This isn’t meant to be anything but an honest recount, mostly to remind myself to do my proper solo research.
A Rulebook of Errors
Not to be rude or mean, but this ranks up there as one of the worst rulebooks for a published game I’ve encountered. That’s the base game rules… The solo rules? Even worse.
Diagrams contradict the rules. Typos abound. And this summary section that could be so helpful? It has the wrong information about the triple worker combo.
I kept looking for the player aids that were unlocked during the campaign, just like the insert. Those were left out.
It took me ages to figure out how to unravel the setup instructions, and longer to understand the basic rules.
Over-Management
The idea behind a mini-mart manager as the solo opponent was excellent! I felt like there would be a competition, and this wouldn’t be as abstract as some other solo games.
But… Oh, no. The amount of work to understand how to manage this mini-mart manager was a lot. Everything functioned differently than how I played. Mostly?
Eagle-eyed players may notice that I’m missing cubes on the red spaces near the left side of this photo.
That was left out of setup, so I was entirely confused about what to do until I figured I would just… Add those cubes?
Anger and Despair: Rare Feelings in This Hobby
Not every solo game needs to create this warm, fuzzy feeling of joy for me. Those are what my favorites do, and I still have a lot of fun even with games that might seem a bit boring! But very, very rarely do I encounter emotions that I don’t seek out with solo games. Those are anger and despair. Sometimes, they come up in narrative games when I get involved.
That’s not a problem: If I’m genuinely upset over something happening to a character or the game world, I’m attached and invested! What I’m referring to are anger and despair over the general hobby. That’s not fun. And this game brought out a level of anger in just how poorly the game design was treated. How could this rulebook be released? It was 2 years late!
Learning the game was terrible. Playing it started to get me excited about seeing the fun present in the design… Until I had to reference a rule and went back to the rulebook. It was not a good feeling at all, and I’m glad to never play this solo again.
On the topic of despair, only one game has resulted in tears while putting it together. An Age Contrived only made it through a partial multiplayer play after the agony of putting together metal player boards that actively took away from the game. Rewinding a tutorial video that went too fast, suffering through ads, hurting my fingers and wrists… Oh, my!
So, to recap this ramble: I can get invested in a game and experience strong, negative emotions, and that game could be amazing. When assembly, setup, or the rules bring out those feelings, though, it’s an unfortunate situation that mars the joy and cheerfulness I attribute to board games in general. And I feel like it’s a shame that’s what I got from this game.
A Day of Puzzling
Setting aside the solo mode for a second, the day phase was actually kind of neat! Placing workers in lines awarded more ingredients, and this could set up clever combinations.
I didn’t like how hard it was to locate the lanterns on these tiles, but it became pretty obvious after I got going.
This part was relatively straightforward, even for the solo opponent part of the time, but it would have been nice to know that you kind of need to do something during spring…
Suffice to say I tried out 2 of 3 actions, and that ensured I would never make enough money to do anything. Alright.
Serving Up All the Food
This fancy edition includes wooden components to replace nearly all of the cardboard tokens, which was a lot of fun!
I filled up my stalls with food, destined to make my customers happy. And I had a fairly good first night, even though I didn’t sell everything to earn a special bonus.
The mini-mart manager? Definitely beat me, but that was OK. I could come back in the summer to do well!
Only I realized I had almost no money and wouldn’t recover until the last round. And I got to a part of the solo rules that didn’t give a ruling on the mini-mart manager… So, the end.
Session Overview
Play Number: 1
Expansion: Night Market: Mini-Mart Expansion
Solo Mode: Included in Night Market: Mini-Mart Expansion
Outcome: Incomplete
This was the exact paragraph that did it for me. Ignore the multiple typos… That wasn’t it. See the very last line at the bottom? Since the mini-mart manager won the seasonal goal, both types of attractions were available and did vastly different things. Was I supposed to be blocked? Were victory points prioritized? This was one of the most frustrating solo modes, and I was glad to stop and walk away from the table.
%
1 Play
Affordability
Price & Value
1
Functionality
Challenges & Mechanics
3
Originality
Design & Theme
3
Quality
Components & Rules
3
Reusability
Achievement & Enjoyment
3
Variability
Distinctness & Randomness
3
+ Pros (Positives)
- There are a lot of lovely wooden components in the shapes of food items to fill the stalls, and are very fun to place.
- Moving through the day phase involves a spatial puzzle that can be more complex than it appears, which is fun.
- Customers add another sort of puzzle in terms of arranging stalls and food to sell during the night phase.
- Gameplay isn’t too complicated with a pretty clear sequence of play, at least for the player and not the solo opponent.
- Dual-layered boards aren’t present for everything, but do make organizing some of the components very easy.
- Different strategies can be tried out, and the randomized seasonal goals seem like they can add a lot of variety.
– Cons (Negatives)
- Setup instructions are convoluted and wrong in some places, and the rulebooks are riddled with major errors.
- Managing the solo opponent follows a completely different process that requires overhead and making choices.
- A lot of components feel oversized and overproduced, to the point that the required table space is enormous for solo.
- Confusing rulebooks make the learning process terrible, spoiling any chance of giving the design room to shine.
Victory Conditions
Score the Most Points
- Overall Goal Progress 0%
Goals and Milestones
Win at least 1 game.
Continue the Conversation
What are your thoughts about Night Market? Are there any other solo games with interesting food-related themes you enjoy? I don’t want to end on a negative note. There is a good game design here that went through a fair amount of development. Maybe if anyone is patient enough to wade through the rules, this mini-mart solo mode could be great!
Completely fair review. Really enjoyed the game play of this game. The rulebook was the worst I’ve read. Setup and pictures completely contradicted each other. It was as if it was written by an AI. Also some production decisions like reducing the amount of stalls completely changed how many scooters you could obtain in multi-player games as there would not be enough stalls to purchase and the upgrade. Looked like this decision to reduce cost for less tiles overlooked this key gameplay connection or the setup modification that would have alloted for this fix, (not starting with an upgraded tile) never made it in to the rulebook. Unfortunately I think this game suffered from too many modules. You thought the game was a hog with the base game? Try adding in the excellent arcade expansion which increases the player board by at least 33%. I feel the modules and all the rules implications where a distraction for getting a quality rulebook and ruleset for an otherwise quality worker placement resource management game.
Oh, my! My husband was talking about using all of the expansions and modules together, and now I’m wondering if we could even fit this on our table… Which is a pretty big dining table with a leaf in the middle. Yikes!
It really is a shame, because this wasn’t like the entire game was poorly designed or developed. With decent rulebooks focused on the perspective of new players, I probably would have had at least a moderately fun time! Alas, everything else you mentioned has crossed my mind and I’ve also been wondering about the scooters in multiplayer.
Seems like there is a fun game to discover, although it’s hard for me to justify putting in the time to figure it all out when there are so many excellent games that put in that work to make learning and playing straightforward. Sadly, this felt like the final steps to finalize the rules were given up on.