Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Here’s something spooky: I don’t own any Halloween-themed board games…not a single one. Now, I’m excited to say that I own one I’ll keep handy for at least the next few pumpkin seasons.
Tricky Treats, a family-weight title published by Cranio Creations last year, hit my table for a couple plays recently. Although I picked this up in Germany right before Halloween, other, buzzier titles hit my table first, so I didn’t play Tricky Treats this past Halloween and let the game sit for a while.
After breaking the game out with my family, then with my review crew, I’m a bit surprised that Tricky Treats is not getting more buzz. The game is a solid family title, with a fun gimmick that reminded both myself and other players of another recent title featuring transparent cards.
Do You Have 20 Minutes?
Tricky Treats is a set collection, card drafting game for 2-4 players that plays in about 30 minutes, longer if you are playing with my nine-year-old, who loves to take his sweet time as he makes his way through each turn of any game, not just this one.
Players manage a small posse of five kids getting ready for Halloween. There’s a grid of nine “treat” houses where a player can send their group to gather candy, gummy bears, and licorice rings, along with three “trick” houses where players can visit to qualify for set collection scoring at the end of the game.
On a turn, a player’s choice is binary: draft one of the five transparent costume cards in a central market, and place that piece of clothing on one of the five kids on their player board. Each kid needs a headpiece, a body/chest adornment, and something to cover their legs. The range of costume pieces are cute, with a wide range of hats, body pieces, skirts, leg coverings, you name it. Each piece is themed along one of three different colors or about five different themes, and once a kid has, say, a hat, they can’t take another headpiece for their costume.
The costume pieces are important for visiting the treat houses; each house will only accept visitors if they have a certain minimum number of costume pieces, themes or colors across their kid posse. When they grab treats, they’ll earn an amount of candy/rings/bears based on the random assignment of that treat house that was done during setup.
The trick houses feature a little more work—each transparent card has one of three trick symbols, but only the symbol showing at the top of each kid’s costume counts when a player wants to visit a trick house. Timing this mechanic was interesting—tricky, you might say—but critical to boost end-game scoring, based on the mix of treats each player grabs during the game.
One player called out the transparent card effect as “Canvas Halloween”, which I agreed with. In the R2i game Canvas, players build each piece of art using transparent cards, which often lead to fun, sometimes unintentionally funny, consequences by the end of each round. In Tricky Treats, I built some pretty cool costumes, as did other players, giving each player’s tableau plenty of different looks by the end of the game.
Players score points for trick houses, personal milestones, and bonuses for completed costumes, amongst a couple other minor bonuses. With four adults at the table, you can knock out a game of Tricky Treats in about 20 minutes.
It Does the Job
Tricky Treats evokes just enough Halloween-themed gaming to make it a worthy addition for a player looking for a family game to play with their 8- or 10-year-old for the holiday season. Even after a couple plays, I don’t think I’m going to see much more from what Tricky Treats has to offer, but I was surprised to find myself enjoying the way drafting cards can lead to ways to build up the right costume combos.
There’s a nice wrinkle with this draft, particularly when players are hunting for the right, say, color of costume or body part covering when the market suddenly dries up. In our first family game of Tricky Treats, three of the four players were looking for lower body/leg cards at the same time, so when that dried up, everyone went after treat houses in the hopes that someone would draft a card that would open up the market a bit.
Also, one of the game’s potential end conditions is when a player has fully kitted out their five-kid army. You could conceivably just go hard to find the right costumes and rush the ending, and I tried that in my second play before deciding to pivot and grab as many trick house scoring conditions as I could. Just when I think I’ve seen everything in the game, Tricky Treats gets just a little trickier!
I wish there were 70 unique costume cards, but sadly, there are not, with some duplicates that shrink the number of truly unique costumes one could really see in a single play. Also, one of the other end-game conditions is tied to the complete exhaustion of the costume card deck…but there’s almost no way that can happen, because a player can only wipe the entire five-card market if all five cards represent the same body section (i.e., I can wipe the market if all five cards are lower body coverings). I never saw that during my plays.
There’s not a ton of variety with the way the treat house grid is set up, either; there are only 10 treat house cards in the box, with nine used in every game.
My kids enjoyed Tricky Treats more than the adults who joined me for plays, so I don’t think this is a game you can play with only core hobbyists. Bringing “muggles” to join you for plays is the better move, if you choose to play this with other adults.
