The Bottom Line
- No mental preparation or menu planning is required to pull off this dinner party.
- You might get lucky enough to take the night off from cooking, serving, and cleaning!
- Recipes were easy to follow and turned out well.
- Company provides additional menus on their website.
- Game took much longer than anticipated.
- Requires a lot of advance organizing on the part of the hostess.
Description
- Includes board, game cards, instructions, invitations, ingredient list, recipes, equipment list.
- Game is played in three rounds and produces three courses.
- Game should take approximately 2 1/2 hours.
- Game cards are four types: ice breaker questions; food trivia; name that dinner tune; and toasts.
Guide Review - Convivium, A Casual Dinner Party Game
The game is designed to be played in three fairly efficient rounds for a total of 2 1/2 hours. However, blame it on poor timekeeping, blame it on slow game playing or perhaps it had something to do with the margaritas at the start, but we were pretty inefficient and didn't eat the main course until 10:00, three hours after we started, and there was still dessert left to prepare and eat!
I expected the evening would take much less preparation than a typical dinner party, yet it seemed to take almost the same effort. I needed to become familiar enough with the game to provide ingredient lists to my guests, go shopping myself, set the table, and pull out the necessary cooking equipment and serving pieces in advance. Fortunately, clean-up was relatively easy.
Many of the questions were funny, others were a bit weak. In the end, we all decided it would be fun to try another Convivium evening in the future.
