BitterSweet Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review BitterSweet, a push your luck and set collection game published by Coo' Games.

Around the Board Game Quest Discord and many articles, I often make Dad jokes and references to music so a game about chocolates should be a sweet opportunity for plenty of food-related puns. I was all ready to pour some sugar on this review until I saw the chocolate-covered pea pod and realized that this game was designed and illustrated by monsters named Mathew Hocker and Olivia Raum, respectively.

The box says the game is meant for ages 10 and up. My son is only eight so I’m not sure if I’m ready to expose him to these horrors lest it makes him afraid of chocolates. But if he’s afraid there will be more left for me. *Queue dark side music*

“Hey Bud, wanna play a game about chocolates? BitterSweet plays one to four players, and the box says takes 15 to 40 minutes to play.”

Each player has a deck of cards that will be shuffled at the beginning of the game and each round they’ll draw two cards and place one under their player sheet under the words Yum! and Yuck! (a variant allows you to pick which goes where). These may be looked at but should be kept face down to hide your goals from your opponents.

You’ll need to win two rounds to win the game.

The goal of the game is to collect chocolates from the center of the table that match your secret Yum criteria, while avoiding your yuck criteria using two actions per round. The available actions are:
• Reveal – Flip over a chocolate card (called Chocs to be hip, presumably)
• Take a face up or face down choc (did that make me sound cool? I felt cool)
• Return a choc to the box and take an empty wrapper (another choc card that wasn’t in play) from the supply next to the box. Empty wrappers don’t count towards your round scoring.

Many times, cards will have special abilities that trigger when revealed or if selected face down. If a card allows you to reveal more chocs and those have on reveal abilities, you also get to trigger those.