Pies Game Review

PIES GAME REVIEW

 I love old pictures and illustrations of fruits like those found in botany textbooks from the late 1800s. The attention to detail is impressive, the gradation of shades and shapes, flaws. Cards for Pies captivated me, lovingly executed work in an identical style. I found myself getting stuck on the cards while going through them. These cards create a world with a distinctly pastoral feel, the spine of the book covered in dust.

 Then I got to the tokens with the pie cut out on them, and I started to worry. They did not feel aesthetic. I caught myself thinking about the old writer's maxim: "Don't put a hat on top of a hat."

 Pies is supposed to be an empowerment game and is being marketed as such, but that's flat out wrong. There are no suits, no pressure to follow, no trumps. The game exhibits none of the defining characteristics of the genre. This is an auction game about collecting fruits and recipes to turn them into pies.

 Each player places one card from his hand in the middle of the table. Then, from the highest card to the lowest, everyone can choose any of the cards played to add to their table. Some cards have recipes that require fruit combinations, while others give you an immediate bonus. Bonuses can be three Pi tokens that can change the value of the card you play, the ability to steal a card from another player, or the aforementioned dog that protects your painting from being stolen.

 If you have successfully collected the required fruit combinations, you can turn over the recipe card and discard the corresponding fruit. This flipped card is now locked, a safe source of late game points.

 Pies are boring from start to finish. There are very few solutions. Playing cards is rarely fun. The quality of solutions is somewhere between limited and non-existent. The only enjoyment to be found is when you play a Pi token that changes the value of your card by 3.14 so that your card is exactly 0.14 higher than the other player's card. A dog card comes out of nowhere. Pi tokens seem like a gratuitous joke. Their combined aesthetic departure from the game's world, suggesting a creation that doesn't know what it is, is perfectly aligned with the game's inability to choose a meaningful line.