Pie Factory
This is a game about assembling pies and selling them in order to impress your pie boss. There’s a row of ingredients out on the table and players will draft these ingredients in order to construct their pies. Every pie needs a crust, most pies have fillings (you can sell a drafted crust for $1 without anything else on it), and some pies have toppings; the more ingredients in your pie, the longer it takes to build and the more it will be worth. Ingredients have a prep time on the upper left of the card and this is used to determine turn order - the longer you spend prepping, the later your turn will be in the following round (unless you take one of the actions that automatically makes you go last). Some ingredients have bonuses associated with them where players will be vying for majority in selling pies that impress secretaries, foremen, presidents, and grandmas. When you run out of cards to fill the ingredient line, you end the first of two days and if players have any incomplete pies out in front of them, they have to discard a filling card because it “went stale”. Then you play through the deck again. You get points for all the pies you sell, plus a bonus if you sold the most pies overall and if you sold the most pies in any given affinity.
This game is bad. It doesn’t make sense thematically - pie makers don’t stand around an assembly line of ingredients baking whatever happens to come their way and then sell those pies in the hopes of impressing secretaries. If you box a pie with the grandma symbol on it, you can use that grandma card to convert a pie that would have impressed the president and instead make it impress a secretary or foreman. What is thematically happening there? The gameplay is tedious. It should be a fast card game, but it really gets bogged down by the way turn order is constantly changing. Playing through the deck twice is not particularly exciting either - it just feels like you play the game twice with little changing between the first and second half. We played this with a group that’s historically been fairly easygoing and forgiving of awkward games. Everyone was unhappy with this one and ready for it to end before we even got through the first day. We soldiered on in order to get the full game experience and I definitely don’t think it was worth it.
I didn’t pay anything for Pie Factory and I’m pretty sure what happened was the previous owner had a similar experience and just threw it in a box with some other games hoping to be rid of it forever. I did the same and have no regrets.
2.5 out of 10.
- Sean
