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Mayor McSweet needs your help to plan and build the city of Sweetlandia! Get ready to bid for the first choice of sugar infused locations to build the sweetest city you can!
Sugar And Spice And All Things Nice
Sweetlandia is a card game set in a Candyland world where players collect delectable cards to build their city. To build your city you will need to collect location cards from a communal playing area.
Location cards on offer include Marshmallow Mountain, Cinnamon Rollercoaster and Pier Amisu and players score doughnuts (points) at the end of each round based on their collections. Only one type of card rolls over into the following rounds and that is the Gumball House because in true Willy Wonka style Gumballs are everlasting in this game!
Some of the cards allow for stacking bonus points, for example collecting a Rocky Road would allow you to gain 2 doughnuts for each of your other roads. Others allow you to collect extra locations. Collecting a Jellybean Jail card however would allow you to steal a Gumball house from another player.
Sweetlandia is played over 3 rounds. At the end of the game, the player with the most doughnuts wins!
Preparing The Batter
Before each round begins players use bidding cards in order to see who gets the first pick of the locations available. This adds an interesting element as each player’s set of bidding numbers is slightly different, making the outcome unpredictable.
These bidding cards also pass each round so that you are playing with a new set of numbers each turn to keep things varied. Working out when you need to use your higher cards and when you would be happy to go last will depend on the location cards available that round and your incentive cards.
Gathering Doughnuts
The doughnuts players will earn are listed on each individual card along with any special abilities also received from that location. However, the larger points come from completing incentive cards of which each player receives one private incentive per round.
Two more incentive cards are played in the open for all players to see and these cards can be scored by all players who complete them. Incentive cards include 7 points for owning 3 or more red locations, 10 points for owning no Forests, Mountains or Rivers and 6 points if you own no blue locations.
What I enjoyed about the incentive cards was that they change each round. This was very important as your private incentive can easily clash with a public one, making one of those impossible to complete. If these were the only cards you could use for the whole game, this would have a game losing impact.
However, as they change each round it just adds a luck element if the cards are complementary to each other or not. It also means that players can still come back from a bad round because at the round end everything is re-shuffled and re-set to start again.
Overall Sweet Thoughts
Theme wise I’m not really sure why this Mayor McSweet makes the players build a city only to tear it down at the end of each round and start again (?!) but seriously the whole family enjoyed Sweetlandia a lot.
The theme was a massive hit with the kids! It’s not overly complicated, but it offers enough to keep adults entertained too and doesn’t take too long to play. We enjoyed the cute location names, artwork and set collecting gameplay.
The cards are of good quality and the colours soft. Also included is a little scorepad for keeping track of your round scores which need to be combined at game end.
Overall, Sweetlandia is a family-friendly, cute card game that looks pretty on the table and is good fun to play. Will I be playing it with adult gaming enthusiasts? No. Will I continue to play it with my kids? Absolutely.
If you are looking for an adult sweet themed game then I would highly recommend Chocolate Factory.
