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Take That games are not games that want you back for good, but rather games where you can deliberately interfere and disrupt the plans of other players. They often get written off because of this. “I don’t do take that games” people chunter. This isn’t always because they are bad experiences, but rather that Take That elements mistaken placed in games where they don’t belong.
However, when everyone knows what they are in for when being a bit of a willy to each other is expected, and when the gameplay is short enough to not really take account of concepts like ‘fairness’ then the fun can be had. Berried Treasure is a dessert based remake of Buried Treasure if the clever pun hadn’t given that away.
Fruity Fingers
Berried Treasure comes with a number of point tokens, four scoring cards and a deck of cards made up of four different colours representing delicious fruit pies. Blueberry pie, raspberry macarons, lemon tarts and mocha lava cakes. Or blue, pink, yellow and grey as you will no doubt call them during the game. There are 15 of each in the game, many just have the illustration some will have 1-3 paws on them and others will simply have the word Moar! On them.
Cards are laid out in four rows with cards dealt left to right and overlapping the previous card so you can see what’s underneath. The top one with four cards, the next two rows with five cards and the bottom with six. The four scoring cards are shuffled and then placed randomly back in the box. The three card deck is then placed near the play area and the top card is turned face up. This will dictate the points given to the player with the most cards of each colour at the end of the round.
On a player’s turn, they take one of the four available cards at the end of one of the rows and add it to their collection. This is visible to all the other players. If a card you take has the word Moar! on it, you may also take another card of the same colour from the end of one of the rows, including the one the Moar! card. However, you ignore any special effects on the second card, which is added to your collection too.
If the card you take has paws on it, you may take up to the number of paws worth of cards of the same colour from one other player’s collection and add them to yours. Again, you ignore any effects on the cards you take. After all the cards have gone from the central rows, you will score points as per the scoring card for the round. The person with the most of a type/colour will score the most points in each category but, any ties for the number of cards cancel each other out.
Fruit Loops
The player with the least amount of points at this stage gets to take one card from another player’s collection and add it to theirs. Everyone keeps the cards they have collected in the previous round in front of them. New cards are dealt out in the same formation, and the player with the least points starts the next round by first turning over the next scoring card. After three rounds the player with the most points wins!
As you can tell Berried Treasure is a very interactive game. You can’t play it effectively without being mean to other players. And this meanness can take a number of forms. You can directly steal from other players of course, but you can also aim to make other players tie in their amounts effectively letting you win with a low amount of cards.
You can also speculate about what colours might be worth the most points in future rounds but remember that one scoring card was taken out of the game during set-up. There is a special set-up for two players which involves a different card layout and slight rule changes. However, the meat of this game is interaction so you want to share these sweet treats with as many people as possible.
Millionaires Shortbread
Berried Treasure is best played as a knife fight in a phone box. Some players prefer to count out their moves and work out the optimal play to land them with the exact cards they need. In a crunchy ‘euro’ game there is some sense to this, but here this kills the pace and the game. While table talk and pointing out the implications of the next move and that it would be better to screw over the other players and not me is acceptable and welcome, too much thinking is not a recipe for fun here.
While we are pip picking the box size, although small, is far too big for the contents which are scoring tokens and a deck of cards. Also, I appreciate the competition is stiff for shelf space, it’s hard to justify such a bump up. That aside, with a group that needs to let off steam, or who enjoys messing with each other, Berried Treasure is a triumph.
Berry Good
There is a real risk with simple games like this removing the element of choice but Berried Treasure retains a good amount of choice. You can and should plan ahead a little as I mentioned above, but there are multiple things to consider. Leaving a tantalising card for an opponent in the hope they don’t check the numbers and are suddenly tying with another player. Little plays like this are the joy of the game.
The components are good, with the tokens for points being decent quality and the cards good. I also really like the artwork. It’s bright, colourful and silly which is all it needs to be. It is going to be lacking on the replay front a little bit. I can see groups descending into the same types of choices being made, and in some groups, the same people being picked on. Kingmaking, playing so certain players win or lose is a very real issue. I accept that I will be teamed up on in a lot of groups I play with, but it can affect the fun had. Despite these niggles Berried Treasure will remain in my collection because it is fast, fun and mean.
