Happy Belated National Donut Day! To be fair, we actually had the donuts on donut day, I’m just now getting around to writing about it. We’d been meaning to get this game played again before we forgot how to, so we got together with a couple of our standard strategy players and settled in for SETI and Suganiyot!

At a Glance…

Sufganiyot

Unfamiliar with Sufganiyot? I was too! I knew it was a jelly type donut eaten traditionally at Hanukkah, but I didn’t really know how it was different from other jelly donuts. In case you’re curious, I’ve included a chart below with some of the key differences.

I could’ve gone with a simpler donut for National Donut Day. I’ve made a pretty great baked pumpkin one before, but I’m a bit of a masochist and decided to try a new, more complicated one. I’d never fried or filled donuts before, and was more scared of the frying part and thought filing would be easy enough. Turns out frying was not bad (except temperature regulation was a bit tricky), but filling was slightly disastrous lol. It ended up delicious in the end though, and that’s all that matters!

Frying donuts is a bit finicky in that you need the temperature hot enough so that the dough doesn’t just absorb the oil and become a brick, but not so hot that it burns the dough and doesn’t cook it properly. At first it was taking forever to heat up the oil to the proper temperature, then it got too hot. When it finally got settled, as soon as I put the donuts in it was hard to keep it maintained at 350*. If you have tips or tricks for this please let me know!

Anyway, that wasn’t too bad, some of them puffed up quite nicely! Roll them in sugar, check! Now came the surprisingly tricky part of filling them. I had a pastry bag and tips, which I’d never used before either. How hard could it be? Turns out I got the wrong kind of tips for this. My jam was too thick! It got stuck in the tip and I kept squeezing the bag and then it came out the other end and was a sticky mess lol. So I tried taking the tip out, but then the pastry bag wasn’t firm enough to make a whole in the donut. Then I tried making the hole with something else, aka a chopstick, but was still struggling to fill it. So I also tried a funnel, which, kinda sorta worked. Point being, if I ever do this again (maybe I’ll be up for it by the time Hannukah comes lol), I will get the proper tools!

However, my mouth didn’t really care about all that and was just happy to get dough, jam, and sugar into it, which is what happened! I made far too many for the four of us, and they really do need to be eaten within 24 hours or so or they get a bit tough. If you’re up for a challenge, give these a go!

SETI

SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) is one of the newest games in our collection, so we wanted to get it played again soon before we forgot how to, haha. It is also in the top 10 heaviest (complex) games in our collection! There are a lot of icons and a lot of moving parts. I feel like it still deserves a few more plays before I decide how much I like it, so stayed tuned for more thoughts as I get it played more, but here are my initial thoughts.

In the game, you are going out and exploring space, trying to find alien life. You’re sending out probes, landing those probes, scanning, getting data, and more. You do this mechanically by taking those actions and playing cards, most of which require money and/or energy, which I find to be very scarce. (If anyone has any tips or suggestions for this please, send them my way!) It’s one of those games where you want to make your resources last as long as possible so you can keep taking turns after everyone else has passed. There’s a bit of area control in the scanning, obviously resource and card management (they can be used for their actions, for their income ability, or discarded for a resource). I like how there are five aliens in the base game, so you never know which ones you’ll meet. I do think it can get a bit bogged down at four players, but to be fair we were all still quite new to it, and it will hopefully go faster in future plays. This is a deceptively heavy game for the box size (especially compared to other recent complex acquisitions like Galactic Cruise and Luthier), so don’t let the box size fool you. This new game has quickly shot to the top of the best games of all time list on BGG, currently listed at # 15 at the time I’m writing this, after only being out a little over a year. If you love space and crunchy games, definitely look into this one!

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].