Pie Town is a new worker placement game from Renegade Game Studios. The first thing you’ll notice about the game is how hefty the box is. It’s packed with counters, dice, dry-erase cards, and little secret recipe boxes. Don’t fret, though. This game is not nearly as complicated as it looks.
The goal is to score the most points by baking and selling the bestest and the mostest pies. The challenge comes from your competition; people take pie baking super seriously in Pie Town and while your workers are gathering ingredients or selling pies, the other bakeries will be spying on them to try and deduce your secret recipe!
You start with two workers (represented by dice). Workers have lots of things they can do: gather ingredients, bake pies, hire new workers, sell pies, or upgrade your bakery to be able to bake more pies or store more ingredients for baking.
Different actions affect your workers in different ways. For instance, while baking pies increases their level by 1, hiring additional workers reduces their level by 2! This means that any worker who hires new workers must be at least level 3 to begin with.
If your workers go to the orchard to gather ingredients or the market to sell pies, your opponents can drop one of their workers who is at least one level higher on top of your worker. For ever point higher, they get to look at one of the three ingredients in your secret recipe. If they successfully guess your secret recipe, they can bake it themselves! However, you can send one of your workers to the Pie Convention to change your secret recipe.
After ten rounds of picking, baking, and spying, everyone totals up their points. The players can also try to guess the secret recipes of their opponents. The more right guesses you make, the more points you get. But guess all three wrong and you lose points.
Pie Town utilizes simple mechanics with clever hidden-knowledge and guesswork to add a fun level of challenge and interaction. The simplicity and social aspects means that it can be enjoyed by a wide range of ages. The ten turn limit means the game will rarely go past 90 minutes in length. The game is designed for two-to-four players with alternate rules that keep the challenge solid through that full range. If you enjoy mixing worker-placement management and strategy with deductive guesswork, get down to Dragon’s Lair Comics and Fantasy® today to pluck your copy and get baking.
