Review: Steal the Win From Friends in SUGAR HEIST
Sugar Heist is a wonderful little card game that allows players to focus on collecting and building up their own points as much as fighting and stealing from opponents. This Kickstarter game is made by the famous Youtuber It’s Alex Clark and offers a lot of fun and thoughtful, challenging choices while not being overly complicated or long-winded. Even though the Kickstarter campaign is closed for now, keep an eye out for its public release because this game would be a fine addition to most board gamers’ libraries.
This game is fairly similar to Ramen Fury or the classic game Bohnanza. Like those games, Sugar Heist has players collecting various types of candies and then locking them away in vaults to keep them safe while attacking and defending against other players. At the end of the game, all players will count the number of candy cards that they have, and the person with the most candy wins!
That is a basic overview, in the actual game, it is a bit more complicated and takes time to explain. But after the first few turns, gameplay gets pretty understandable and easy. The most interesting thing is that each turn has very limited choices on what to do and then forces players to choose between keeping candy, attacking enemies, or spending candy to buy extra vault space or attack cards and more. This balancing challenge of choice makes every turn feel quick while also feeling very important. The overall design is really great, I felt that the games played very fairly among players. Two and four players felt a little more luck-based, making it more of a party game. But three players felt like a perfect balance of competition, counting cards and luck.
The visual design and art of all of the candies and babies and attack cards are vibrant, energetic, and look great on the glossy finish. It’s also really nice that the three different sets of cards (candy, battle, and vault cards) all look drastically different on the back and front so it is easy to clean up and reorganize to put away or play a game.
Although this game doesn’t have the strong strategies of games like Scythe and Catan, it does its job perfectly well as an entertaining party card game that lets players rely on both skill and luck in order to win. You can check out the Kickstarter page here and look out for updates for this game’s final release!