Sushi Go Game: Rules, Sushi Go Party and the Editions

What the Sushi Go game is

Sushi Go is a card game about choosing what to keep before your neighbor gets a turn at it. Everyone holds a hand of sushi cards. At the same moment, each player picks one card, puts it face down, and passes the rest of their hand to the left. Then everybody flips their pick, and you look at a new, smaller hand.

That's the whole engine. The hobby calls it card drafting: you build your own pile out of cards that move around the table. The fun is in the timing. You see a dish you want, but you also see what the person on your left needs, and the hand you pass is the hand they get.

The game runs three rounds. At the end of each round you score the dishes in front of you. After round three, the desserts get counted, and high score wins. Gamewright's page sums up the goal as grabbing the best combination of sushi dishes as they go by, and that's a fair summary.

The box facts for the original game, from Gamewright's page and rulebook:

• Players: 2 to 5
• Ages: 8+
• Time: 15 minutes
• Contents: 108 cards and a rules sheet
• Not included: a pencil and paper for the score (the rulebook asks you to grab them)
• Competitive, not co-op: everyone scores their own pile

Sushi Go Party is the bigger box. Gamewright lists it at 2 to 8 players, 8+ and 30 minutes, with 181 cards, 22 menu tiles, 8 wooden pawns and a game board. The board is a score track, so the pencil gets the night off.

How Sushi Go plays

The rules below are in my own words, from Gamewright's rules sheet for the original Sushi Go. For the Party changes, see the next section.

Setup

1. Shuffle all 108 cards.
2. Deal each player a hand, face down: 10 cards for 2 players, 9 for 3, 8 for 4, 7 for 5.
3. Put the rest of the deck face down in the middle. You'll deal from it again in rounds two and three.
4. Pick a scorekeeper and find a pencil.

Keep your hand secret. The cards you keep go face up in front of you, and the rulebook suggests grouping matching dishes together so you can see your plan at a glance.

A turn, start to finish

1. Look at your hand and pick one card to keep.
2. Put it face down in front of you. Wait until everyone has chosen.
3. Everyone flips their card at once.
4. Pass the rest of your hand face down to the player on your left.
5. Pick up the hand you were passed. Repeat.

When the last card of each hand gets passed, you just add it to your pile. The rulebook notes that the final card is usually junk, and once in a while it's a gift from a neighbor who had no choice. I've been on both ends of that.

How the dishes score

Each kind of card scores its own way. This is where the decisions live.

• Maki rolls: count the roll icons on all your maki cards. Most icons scores 6, second most scores 3. Ties split the points, and the leftovers are dropped.
• Tempura: a pair scores 5. One alone scores nothing.
• Sashimi: a set of three scores 10. One or two score nothing.
• Dumplings: the more you have, the more each is worth. One scores 1, then 3, 6, 10, and five or more score 15.
• Nigiri: egg scores 1, salmon 2, squid 3.
• Wasabi: the next nigiri you take goes on top of it and triples. A squid nigiri on wasabi scores 9.
• Chopsticks: on a later turn, call out "Sushi Go" and take two cards from the same hand. Then the chopsticks go back into your hand and get passed on.

One wasabi holds one nigiri. You can own more than one chopsticks card, but you use only one per turn. A wasabi with nothing on it scores zero, which feels like ordering the sauce and forgetting the food.

The dumpling scale is my favorite thing in the box. Look at the jumps: 1, 3, 6, 10, 15. Those are triangular numbers, the ones you get stacking dots into a triangle. I put that on a worksheet once, and a seventh grader asked if there was a dumpling for 21. There isn't. The scale stops at five.

Pudding and the end of the game

After each round you discard your pile, except for pudding. Pudding cards stay with you all game. Once round three is scored, the player with the most pudding gets 6 points, and the player with the fewest loses 6. Ties split, and if everyone has the same amount, nobody scores for pudding.

High total wins. If two players tie, the one with more pudding takes it. So dessert is a tiebreaker, a bonus and a penalty. The menu takes it seriously.

Two variants in the rulebook

• Pass both ways: pass left in rounds one and three, right in round two.
• Two players: deal three hands of 9, and a third dummy hand sits between you. On your turn you draw a card from the dummy's pile, then pick one card for yourself and one for the dummy. You take turns running the dummy. In a 2-player game, nobody loses points for having the fewest pudding.

Those are printed rules, not ours. Our one house rule: the scorekeeper reads every round's points out loud before anyone discards. It saves the "wait, did I get the maki?" question from coming up at the end.

How Sushi Go Party changes the menu

Sushi Go Party keeps the turn the same: everyone picks a card, everyone reveals, hands go left. What changes is the deck. You build it before you play.

The Party rulebook splits the dishes into groups. A game uses nigiri every time, plus one kind of roll, three appetizers, two specials and one dessert. You can pick a menu yourself or use one of the suggested menus in the rulebook. A few of them, in my words:

• My First Meal: a gentle mix for first-time players
• Sushi Go: the classic menu from the original box
• Party Sampler: a taste of the new dishes
• Master Menu: for players who already know the game well
• Big Banquet: suggested for 6 to 8 players
• Dinner for Two: suggested for 2 players

Each chosen dish has a menu tile that sits in a slot on the board, so everyone can see how it scores. Desserts work differently from the original. Before each round, a set number of dessert cards from a separate pile gets shuffled into the deck, more in round one than in round three, per a small table in the rulebook. At the end of a round you set your desserts aside, and they score when the game ends.

The deal changes too. The Party rulebook deals 10 cards each for 2 or 3 players, 9 for 4 or 5, 8 for 6 or 7 and 7 for 8 players.

New cards that change how a turn feels

Some Party dishes do something the moment you play them. The rulebook calls these out:

• Miso soup: if anyone else plays a miso soup that same turn, it's discarded
• Spoon: name a card, and the first player to your left holding it hands it over
• Menu: draw 4 cards, play 1 and put the rest back
• Special order: copies a card you've already played
• Takeout box: flip played cards face down, and they're worth 2 each

There are also new rolls, like temaki and uramaki, and new desserts, like green tea ice cream and fruit. A few dishes have player-count limits. Menu and special order can't be used with 7 or 8 players, and spoon and edamame can't be used with 2.

That last list is why I'd learn the original first. Party isn't harder card by card. It's that every menu teaches a slightly different game, and the first night with a new mix goes better when the turn itself is already second nature.

Sushi Go editions on Amazon US right now

Our data for this page lists three Gamewright boxes on Amazon US as of October 2026. The table above shows the players, age and play time each listing gives. Where a listing leaves a field out, you'll see a dash.

• Sushi Go (Gamewright): the original card game. The listing says 2 to 5 players, ages 8+, 15 minutes, and set collection as the game type. This is the 108-card box the rules above come from.
• Sushi Go Party (Gamewright): the deluxe version. The listing in our data names set collection as the game type and doesn't fill in players, age or time. Gamewright's own page lists 2 to 8 players, 8+ and 30 minutes.
• Sushi Go Party Chef's Special (Gamewright): listed as the Chef's Special edition, 2 to 8 players, ages 8+, and not an expansion. The listing in our data doesn't say what's in the box beyond that, and Gamewright's site didn't have a page we could open for it. I won't guess at the contents.

None of the three listings is an expansion. Each one is a complete game you can play out of the box.

Which one fits your table

My one opinion for this page: buy for your usual group size, not for the biggest number on the box. Sushi Go stops at 5. Sushi Go Party goes to 8. If your table is four people most weekends, the small box covers it and fits in a coat pocket. If you host six or more, or the cousins come over a lot, the Party box is the one that seats everybody.

Some quick matches, from the listings and Gamewright's pages:

• A family of 3 or 4: Sushi Go
• Game nights of 6 to 8: Sushi Go Party or the Party Chef's Special
• Two players most nights: either box works. The original has a 2-player dummy variant, and Party has a Dinner for Two menu
• Someone who already owns Sushi Go: Party adds new dishes and a board
• A short game for the car or a trip: the original's 108 cards and no board

Who should skip Sushi Go

Skip it if your group wants a game where you can plan the whole evening from the start. You only see a few hands each round, and the card you need may get kept two seats away. That's the point of the game, but some players find it frustrating.

Skip it too if you want everyone talking and laughing out loud the whole time. Sushi Go is a quiet game. Everyone looks at their cards, picks, flips, passes. It's friendly, but it's not a party game in the shouting sense, even in the Party box.

And if your youngest player is under 8, wait. Gamewright's age is 8+, and the scoring asks a kid to track maki icons, sets of three and a dessert race at once.

If you like Sushi Go, look at these

Pages chosen by what they share with Sushi Go: card play, short rounds and tables of 2 to 8.

• 7 Wonders: the same pick-and-pass idea, for up to 7 players, with a board for each player
• Card games: the wider shelf of card games by player count
• Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza: another small card box, louder and faster
• Flip 7: a quick press-your-luck card game
• Best family card games: our list of card games for mixed ages

See the Gamewright brand page for the rest of its lineup.

Pick one, pass the rest, and save room for pudding.