Diced Veggies has a simple concept. Draft dice and fulfill recipes. Here's the hook, you draft dice from a "chopping block" using a cardboard cleaver. Each turn, you'll take the cleaver and separate as many dice as you'd like as long as they add up to ten or less. Each colored die represents a different ingredient and recipes will require certain ones to fulfill. When you have all of the required dice you can complete a recipe for it's points. However, you can also tie on a hype card to the recipe for even more points. These will force you to consider the overall values of the pips and other factors but they're key to victory. After your action, you'll draw a recipe or hype card and discard down to 2 each or 8 dice then the next person goes. Once someone has completed 6 recipes, the game will end and players will count all of their recipes and hype cards. Whoever has the most is the winner.
The Good: The dice drafting mechanic is deceptively tricky. Since the recipes you have are very prescriptive, there may not be the ones you need next to each other so you can try and plan for a hype card or just draft exactly what you need and hope it's there next time around. Hype cards bring in an extra level of difficulty. For a light game, it's a huge plus to include some extra challenging bits. The general theme of using a cleaver to pull your dice is a fun idea. It's silly but it works perfectly.
The Okay: Being forced to keep only 2 recipes and hype cards each meant I had to discard more than I would have liked to. This especially came into play if you were working on a perfect combination of hype and recipes. You had to sacrifice to make one work.
Final Thoughts: Diced Veggies, while light is also a ton of fun. There's something extremely satisfying about using that cleaver to draft dice. For extra fun, you can use a real cleaver. Don't. Seriously. Obviously, this is a light game. It's designed to be so if you're looking for heavy strategy this won't be it. The inclusion of a family mode for kids makes the game work for younger ages but the full game rules are perfectly fine for almost anyone. This is a perfect appetizer to kick off a game night before you dig into the main course.
Thanks to Kids Table BG for providing a review copy.