This colorful card game is a light, easy-to-learn quick play. Your objective is to eat most of your character’s favorite cake. You have to collect ingredients and ask your friends if they can help contribute to your ingredient list. Your friends can help you out and lend you ingredients, gaining points for themselves, or say no and fall into that frenemy category.
Frenemy Pastry Party is a game of collaboration and deception. It has similar elements to Gin and Texas Hold-em. Through rounds of collecting ingredients, baking, and watching friends slyly hoarding all the key ingredients to themselves, you find yourself keeping that balance of friend and enemy.
A few of the Marooners’ Rock team have even been reading the rules and how the game is played. At the start of the game, the cake cards and ingredient cards are shuffled. Prior to the character setup phase, the dealer places 3 cake cards and 5 ingredient cards on the baker’s table. Once the base baker’s table is established, players draw animal cards according to the number of players in the game; each player receives one card, looks at it, and then places it face down. Once all players have placed their animal card face down the game begins. The player to last eat a cake pastry goes first and turns proceed clockwise around the table.
To begin each player’s turn, the player indicates 1 type of ingredient from the bakers’ table and adds it to their hand; if there are 4 or more of the same ingredient on the table, the player is able to draw 2. The player then indicates what type of cake they want to bake. After indicating the type of cake they want to bake, the player then can ask other bakers for assistance. Fellow bakers have the option to contribute to the cake or not contribute ingredients. If the player has enough ingredients a cake is successful, and if not, they fail. If they fail the cake goes back on the Bakers Table and ingredients return to their contributor.
The game ends when there are only 2 cakes remaining or no ingredients left. Players then tally their points based on the type of cakes made and the ingredients that went into it. If one of the cakes baked is the animal’s favorite, additional points are rewarded. If two players have similar cakes, the player with the most of each ingredient type gets the points.
I really found the frenemy aspect of the game interesting. If your strategy is to be a friend, this a co-op game. You’re helping others bake their cakes, and you get points for each ingredient you lend to them for their recipes. If you play as an enemy, then you hoard ingredients and just play to win without helping anyone else. Choosing your strategy to try to stay in the frenemy zone was the best part–it’s a challenge to walk the line between helping and serving only yourself. And while you can play with as little as 3 people, the fun really starts when you have at least 4: there’s more opportunity to build alliances and work together when there are more players.
While I enjoyed the game, I did find myself wishing for more of a challenge. I can see this as a great game for kids. It encourages communication, problem-solving, and strategy. It can also be a lesson in seeing the consequences of how you relate to other people–working together helps you gain points, but playing for your own gain may work against you. Overall, I’m keeping this in the kid’s category of my game collection. It’s not one that offered enough of a challenge for a table of adults. This game has a lot of replayability since the rules are simple and most of the unknown factor lies in the personalities of those playing.
Frenemy Pastry Party is a card game recommended for players ages 8 and up. It can be played in 15-3 minutes, and is suited for 3-6 players. Solis Game Studio is bringing the English version of Frenemy Pastry Party to Kickstarter on May 12.
