Whenever we get the chance, we love to get together with smaller groups of our friends and play heavier, longer games. This past Friday was just such a day! I had no particularly thematic food to pair with the games, just some cookies I’d be dying to try haha. I’ve recently been doing some extensive recipe research, trying to find new things to try. First, I was trying to find a good way to follow my favorite bakers so I knew when they posted new things. Gemini suggested I try Feedly, which led me to find a whole bunch of another new cooking websites! I spent far too many hours browsing all the recipes on all the sites and, long story short, I now follow about 20 different sites 🫣. Oops. This, like many things in my life, may have gotten out of hand lol. Anyway, on one of these new sites, I discovered a recipe for hotteok cookies! Squeal! Read on to find out more!

At a Glance…

The Sweets

Hotteok is a popular and delicious street food from South Korea, where we lived for a year. While we didn’t have it super often, we had it enough that it left a lasting impact on me and my sweet tooth. It’s a fried pancake treat, filled with sugary, nutty goodness. I’m not a huge fan of frying things myself, so when I saw that I could have a similar taste in a cookie I was sold! (I was also excited to try this on a day I wasn’t needing to bake gf, since this recipe didn’t have any specific substitutions it recommended).

This was a new-to-me website, and it did not disappoint! One thing I *loved* about it just from skimming the recipe was how the ingredients were listed in grams AND tablespoons/cups. Having lived in so many countries where the unit of measurement is not always the same, this is super helpful and I wish all recipes did this. This recipe was my first time doing a couple of things- chilling cookie dough and stuffing it. I of course did not leave myself quite enough time, so it probably only chilled for about 45 minutes instead of the minimum hour it recommended. It didn’t seem to negatively impact it though. After the nearly allotted chill, it was time to stuff! Instead of being precise and using a cookie scoop (like the one I specifically bought for this recipe 🤦‍♀️), I just eye balled it and divided the dough into the roughly eight sections it was supposed to make. I then took a scant tablespoon and stuff it with my peanuty-walnuty (I did half and half, for fun!), sugary mixture. Unfortunately I had extra stuffing leftover, and I hated to waste it, so I then did the ridiculous thing and tried to poke a hole in the beautifully stuffed and rolled in sugar cookies and put the remaining stuffing it. It kinda worked. I also had extra cinnamon-sugar topping leftover, so… I just poured it on top. They turned out well! A bit more cookie-to-filling ratio than I think was ideal, but perhaps it would’ve been hard to stuff if they’d been thinner. Overall they were delightful and delicious, and had that hotteok goodness I’d been missing! Give them a try; they won’t dissapoint!

The Strategy

For games, we were trying to cram in Five Tribes and The Magnificent at full player count (4 players each), with two of them learning the games for the first time, within the space of 3 hours. I had my doubts we could do it, but I was proven wrong. We did it!

Five Tribes is an AP (analysis paralysis) inducing, crunchy and delightful puzzle of a game. In a nutshell, you pick up a handful of meeples on a tile, dropping them off one at a time in a path to a new tile, mancala style. Where you land, you do the action of the color meeple you ended with, and the action of the tile. You’re trying to get points in various ways, with all those meeples and tiles scoring and doing things slightly differently, and trying to clear tiles to claim them with your camels. Additionally, and this is usually my downfall, you bid on turn order…with points. 😬Despite this, I ended up winning with my army of yellow meeples! I love the puzzle of this game, but I will be honest, I am a slow and annoying person to play with lol, always looking for that perfect move. If you love a game where you want to optimize your turns and find that perfect move, this is the game for you. If you are paralysed by indecision, or you know your friends will be, you might want to consider that carefully when deciding to play this one. It’s one of my favorites, but not for frequent plays.

The Magnificent is in my top ten favorite games of all time! It’s not the most beautiful or most thematic game, but I do like the visual contrast of the dark boards with the bright dice and tiles. In it, you are putting on circus performances by…drafting dice? 🤷‍♀️I’m not sure exactly. But mechanically, on your turn you take a die, and with the strength of it (aka the pips), you either move your circus wagon around and get gems and tents, build up your circus by getting polyomino tiles to meet the goals of your cards, or use it to put on on the shows when you’ve finished those cards. I’m a sucker for any game that lets you say ‘hey look what I built!’ at the end of a game, and this one does just that. The balance of always wanting high dice (and they build upon each other too!), but having to pay for those at the end of the round is a tricky balance. I feel so proud when I get my whole board filled by the end (rare), or put on some epic shows and score a bunch of points. It’s only 3 rounds total in the game, but it packs a punch! Check it out!

PS- For fun thematic mood setting, I recommend listening to the soundtrack to Aladdin with Five Tribes and the soundtrack to The Greatest Showman with The Magnificent 🙂

Want to buy these games? Check out your friendly local game store (FLGS), Amazon [here], or get a first-order discount at Board Game bliss [here].

Or buy Five Tribes at Amazon.com