Many creatures go on a journey in the hope of making to a magical land. One that might be a castle made of cakes and full of wondrous items. Creatures and Cupcakes is a very simple tabletop game that takes the idea of moving magical creatures around a map to be the first to get two of your mythical creatures to a castle.
Creatures and Cupcakes comes with a few different items; a deck of event cards, a bunch of really cute cupcakes tokens, a bag for these tokens, some elixir potion tokens, four different mythical creature types in four different colors and a board that shows the various forests and cupcake castle. The board is split into four sections in the following colors: pink, yellow, blue and orange. Each of the forests have a different amount of spaces between them and the castle, with orange having the most and yellow having the least.
At the starting point of each forest each player has an appropriate creature in their colour. That’s when the game begins. The first player begins by drawing colored cupcakes out of the bag and placing them in a line in front of them. Each of these cupcakes, with the exception of the special purple cupcakes, represent moving one tile in that colored forest. Purple cupcakes allow the player to immediately draw an action card — some of which need to be used right away, during that player’s next turn or whenever that player wants.
It’s a game of deciding how far you’d like to go and pushing your luck to get there. A If the player draws two matching cupcakes in a row then they lose their chance to bank the moves. All of the cupcakes must return to the bag and the player receives an elixir potion that matches the color of cupcakes which overfed their creatures. Rather than eating cupcakes to excess you can bank them, if you do this then each cupcake (bar the purples) become a single move for your creatures along the relevant track.
If you do get two of the same colored cupcakes, in a row, from the bag, you can possibly save yourself, but only if you have the appropriate coloured elixir. The elixirs you are earning can be used to take off the last cupcake if they match in color. You must then return that cupcake to the bag and can continue drawing or take that moment to bank what you have. This element of risk can cause players to just pass the bag around without making moves for a while.
Event cards do spice things up, as there are quite a few purple cupcakes in the bag. Events normally benefit the player who received the card and some are quite powerful. Cards allow you to move one of your creatures forward two tiles if they have been overtaken on a forest route or swap around any two creatures in one forest, for example. When I played with my friends, these events were fully taken advantage, and it saw some players, who had otherwise never really moved on a track, to get very far ahead. There is one super powerful card that literally allows the person who draws it to move any creature they want back one and two other creatures forward one (or one creature forward two spaces).
Overall, Creatures and Cupcakes is a cute game for all ages. The game itself is super easy to set up, simple to explain and very easy to understand. The characters and board are cute — the cupcake tokens really stand out as something wonderful, especially as they look like gummies. Although it’s not a complex game our group had a good time playing it and enjoyed seeing how many cupcakes they can pluck out of the bag before losing the lot!
Creatures and Cupcakes is available now on the developer’s website.
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