Sweet Takes is a trick-taking game with multiple suits that contains numbers from 1-10. Sweet Takes is a little bit different as the high valued cards are worth less points, where the low valued cards are worth more points. So it will be up to you to know when to play your cards for whoever might win that track. Sweet Takes is also known as Gummi Trick and was designed Hisashi Hayashi and published by Hasbro.
What’s in the Box?
- 60 cards
- 1 turn tracker
How’s it Play?
This is a trick-taking game where each player starts with 3 unknown cards face down in front of them with 9 cards in their hand. Players play one card at a time matching the suit if possible. The player with the highest value card in a suit wins that trick. The player who starts the round gets to pick a card that determines the suit that all other plays must play if they have a card matching that suit. If a player does not want to play the matching suit they can always choose to play one of the cards in front of them in their secret stash. But this card is unknown to all players until played.
If you are the second player you play a card from your hand or from your secret stash. The card from your hand must match suits from played out cards. If you don’t have that suit in your hand, you can play a card making a secondary stash. All other players will continue doing this until each player has played a card.
The player with the highest value of the start suit collects all cards of that suit, and gain points shown on that card. The player with the highest secondary suit collects all cards of that suit, and so on. The next round begins with the player who won the primary suit from last hand.
After 12 rounds, the game ends, and players will count up the point value shown on their collected cards. The player with the most points wins the game.
The Verdict
Sweet Takes actually uses a system that is different from most trick taking games. The higher valued cards are worth less points and the lower valued cards are worth more points. So this twists the way you want to win tricks a little but because you don’t want to give up your low cards to someone because they will get more points that way, so you might play a higher valued card, and if so you might win but you might not win many points due to everyone playing high valued cards.
You can also choose to flip over one of your cards from your secret stash and try to luck out becoming secondary suit and winning points from at least your card and maybe even more if you get a lucky flip and win other cards as well. You have 12 cards total and you will need to strategically play them in a way where you don’t give away big points to others and try to play cards to win the high points cards from others.
The trick taking part of Sweet Takes just puts in this surprise, and I feel like it gives the game a change that I haven’t felt in any other trick taking games. Overall I like the idea of the game, and I like how the points are spread out. The art is just amazing in any way, and the theme for me is not exciting, but the gameplay is solid and gives you a game that isn’t the same as something else out there.
You can grab Sweet Takes from Amazon or your FLGS at an MSRP of 9.99!
Images via Hasbro
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