The genesis of Sweet Mess wasn't exactly smooth sailing. After a successful Kickstarter The game could only be delivered after Fantasia Games took over the project. Revisions followed until the game was finally released in German by Skellig Games in 2024. I took a look at the deluxe edition of the game.
In Sweet Mess We face off against the competition in a somewhat chaotic baking contest. We collect ingredients from various bowls and, due to the hectic pace, spill a few things into other bowls. The goal is to complete various recipes as quickly as possible. Recipes of one type earn you awards, and as soon as a person has three of these awards, the game ends.
Small and big rules
basically is Sweet Mess A simple gathering of resources to fulfill recipes. Everything is controlled by an action marker, which is moved to one of three possible spaces on each turn. Each of these spaces represents two actions. You can always perform one. If you want to perform the second, you have to pay a coin.
All three spaces offer an action to obtain resources. Here, you select a bowl and take all the ingredients from it. When you empty the bowl, some of the ingredient spills into neighboring bowls and onto the table edges. You can also take ingredients from these bowls.
The ingredients must then be placed on your board. Different areas are available for this, each with different rules regarding which ingredients may be placed there (four different single ingredients, four identical ingredients, two different pairs).
Other options include taking a new kitchen appliance card (valuable one-time effects), moving prepared recipes forward, or preparing up to two recipes.
To prepare recipes, you must hand over the required ingredients from the recipe card. The recipes always require three different ingredients (some specific, some random) in quantities between one and four. Prepared recipes are placed below your board in one of the four areas and activate the effect of the corresponding area.
Once you've completed your turn's actions, three more steps follow. First, you can reserve a recipe by discarding a kitchen appliance, or you can prepare an already reserved recipe. Reserving has the advantage of immediately receiving the effect of the area below your board.
Now all recipes move one level further without activating their effects. If recipes move out of level 0, they are completed. If the recipes belong to level XNUMX, they now receive a one-time effect.
Completed recipes can be used as a final step for awards. Recipes come in three types. For two or three symbols of a recipe type, you can earn an award. Any two recipe symbols can be used as wild cards. For these awards, you receive either an immediate effect (2 of the same kind) or five additional victory points at the end of the game (3 of the same kind).
Once a person has received three awards, the game ends after the next round.
Sweet Mess can also be played solo. Here, you compete against the Chef-o-tron. This has two "arms" that move along the left and right sides of the table and take all the ingredients from the largest bowl in the row next to them. The solo deck determines which arm is activated and what further actions the bot will perform.
Information about Sweet Mess
| Number of people: 1 to 4 people Age: from 10 years Playing time: 45 to 90 minutes Difficulty: expert game Long-term motivation: good Mechanics: Drafting, Set Collection Game idea: Jonny Pac, Yoma, Antonio Zax Illustrations: James Churchill, Yoma Publisher: PIKA Games (Fantasia Games); German edition: Skellig Games Official Website: Sweet Mess Year of publication: 2024 Language: German Cost: 20 euros (Deluxe 50 euros) |
Conclusion
Haptic and optical Sweet Mess Completely convincing. Handling the plastic ingredient chips on the large trays in the center of the table is truly impressive. The trays, made from cardboard pieces and a plastic piece, also do a great job of keeping all the chips in place. The inlay also makes setting up the game very easy. The colorful artwork, some of which (unfortunately) is also quite appetizing, rounds out the great material impression.
The feel and progression of the game over the course of a game are also great. At the beginning, you wonder how you'll even begin to stick to the stated playing time because everything seems so slow, but the more ingredients you store, the more powerful effects you unlock with the 2-piece badges, the more you use the kitchen appliances, and the more you perform two actions per turn with the coins, the faster the game progresses. Despite all this, the turns remain pleasantly short. The end of the game comes much sooner than you'd like. The race for the badges creates great excitement.
The central mechanic of picking up ingredients and spilling them is also great. Over time, you build up full and colorful bowls that can take you a long way. However, due to the restrictions on which ingredients you can have, the largest bowl isn't always the best choice. You should also keep an eye on what others might need so you don't end up dumping everything in one bowl. Thanks to the kitchen appliances and the one-time effects from recipes, you can also be that important step faster than your fellow players when gathering ingredients.
Where the game falls short (as is unfortunately standard for me with Fantasia Games) are the rules. The many small, unintuitive rules make the game much more difficult to explain than it needs to be. These rules add little to the gameplay value. In Endless Winter or Unconscious Mind, this problem is somewhat overshadowed by the complexity of the game, but for me, it's still an argument against both games. Sweet Mess The rules are unnecessarily bloated, for example, due to the ingredient restrictions on your own board or the intricacies of activating effects on prepared, reserved, or finished recipes. Here, Fantasia Games once again lacks the necessary focus on the essentials.
Apart from that, Sweet Mess But it's completely convincing. The mechanics surrounding ingredients and recipes are good enough to sustain the game in the long run, even despite the bumpy rules. However, with the group size, you should be aware that the ideal group size is rather small. The more people play, the more chaotic everything becomes. This might be suitable for some groups, but for us, the game is most enjoyable with two players and solo.
The solo mode is super easy to control and hardly distracts from your own turn. However, a decent game aid/turn overview for the bot would be really necessary, as there are always a few steps to follow that are simply not possible without reading up on them, especially in the first few rounds.
With its two difficulty levels and possible variations, the bot offers an exciting challenge for both experienced players and beginners.
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