Don’t read this on an empty stomach, Today we take a look at a game that sounds like a lot of fun. Come check out Pie Town, another classic by Renegade Games!
Pie Town is a worker placement game for 2-4 players designed by Daniel Fremgen and published by Renegade Games.
A typical game plays in between 60-90 minutes and retails for $45.00.
Welcome to Pie Town in which you are trying to run the best bakery in town. You gather up ingredients and baking pies to selling them. Each player also has a kitchen which can be upgraded to run more efficiently by hiring new workers, increasing your storage room, or building an extra oven to bake even faster. The game features beautiful custom dice that represent your workforce and the number showing shows their expertise.
You take turns placing your workers on action spaces which will grant a particular action and, depending on the space, you may level up or level down your workers. There are six different ingredients you can pick at the orchard in order to put them into pies. These range from various common apples to rare ingredients such as pumpkin, strawberries, as well as bananas. Then earn points just by simply baking pies, however the best way to earn points is by selling your pies and the rarer the ingredients, the more points you will earn, plus the level of the worker will yield points as well so the more experienced the worker the more it’s worth.
One of the most interesting features of Pie Town is the deduction element the game has. At the set up each player will receive a pie box and choose two common and one rare ingredient to place inside. This is the player’s top secret recipe! These secret pies will earn the best points, but beware if another player figures out your secret recipe they also can bake it for those very same points at no risk to them. See when you bake pies, you show all the ingredients you are using, but you needn’t dictate which ingredients are for which pie. The caveat to this is, the fewer different pies you make in the same batch as your secret one, the easier it is to deduce your secret recipe’s ingredients.
The other way to learn your opponent’s secret ingredients is by spying on them. This is achieved by placing a higher level die on your opponent’s lower level dice. By doing this, not only do you get to perform the action granted by the location you are spying on, but you also get to see one ingredient per difference in the levels of the dice. So for example by placing a six on to a three will allow you to see all three ingredients.
All is not lost if you are found out, as you can go to the pie convention and change one of your secret ingredients foiling your opponent’s espionage efforts.
The game is played for nine rounds until a final bake-off occurs and the baker with the most points wins.
Pie Town is a delightfully fun and beautiful game with a tasty theme. This game is a huge hit with my gaming group, the only downside is it makes us crave pie afterward, haha. If you enjoy worker placement games with a twist then I highly recommend this game for your game night.
