Base price: $18.
2 – 6 players.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Sweet & Spicy was provided by Flat River Games.

So I reviewed Spicy a ways back with the explicit goal of getting to Sweet & Spicy soon after, and here we are. I got to it! This is kind of the nature with reviews; I have a whole spreadsheet with weeks upon weeks upon weeks of reviews planned and then the entire thing almost immediately goes to hell. It would be inspiring if it weren’t so frustrating. But I’m back on the grind now and I’m trying to get these reviews out for y’all quick as I can. Something to look forward to. This week I’m heading back to flavortown to cover Sweet & Spicy, a family-friendly variant of the fantastic card game Spicy. Let’s get to it!

In Sweet & Spicy, the local cats have once again gotten together to test their mettle against some spicy eats. These kittens don’t necessarily have the spice tolerance of the other, bigger cats, however, so they’ve decided to skip wasabi and play with lemons instead. That’s kind of spicy, in a sour way. Largely, Sweet & Spicy plays exactly the same as Spicy, with one major difference. At the start of the game, each player receives a “Total Wild” card. These cards play like normal cards during the game, but they cannot be challenged (different back) and they cannot earn you a trophy for playing them last (you just draw five cards). They can, however, be the stopgap you need to wait for someone else to make the wrong move or to give you a turn of breathing room. They have one other useful benefit: when you lose a challenge and draw two cards, you may draw a third card from the top of the Total Wilds pile, if any remain. The complexity may be down a bit, but the spice level has never been higher! Can you handle the heat?

Overall: 8.5 / 10

All things being equal, I like Sweet & Spicy about as much as the original Spicy. I think there are some great things going for it, though. Spicy is one of the better card games I’ve played in a hot minute, and I think making the core gameplay more approachable for family play is both great and extremely silly. I want to see a child try to outbluff me, mostly because it’s probably not that hard but it will ruin my self-esteem. Also, the new art style? Adorable. Who doesn’t love little kittens? It’s additionally great that you can still play standard Spicy with this deck; you just remove the Total Wild cards and play normally. Total Wilds, also? A great add. It lowers the complexity of the game a bit and makes it more approachable since you have a card that cannot get called out. I think that’s pretty great. These are all solid ways to differentiate Sweet & Spicy from Spicy, especially if you find the unique artwork of Spicy isn’t for you.

That’s just the problem, though: I love Spicy’s artwork. Sweet & Spicy is adorable, yes, but Spicy is so unapologetically weird and strange. It’s so out there that it forces you to pay attention to it. So missing that in this is a bit of a letdown, but they’re definitely targeting a different audience with this release, and I get and respect that. I do wish that they had left wasabi in and removed either chili or pepper, since chili pepper still is a phrase that confuses players a lot. There is a chili suit. There is a pepper suit. There is a chili pepper suit, but that is not the pepper suit. It can be a lot for your first game, and leaving that in this as well is a little mean.

That all said, the core of Sweet & Spicy is still very much a bluffing game that forces players to be precise about what they suspect the other player is lying about, and I love that. It’s clever and it flips the core of the BS-style games of my youth on its head. Sure, my friend knew I was lying; she just consistently got what I was lying about wrong. That’s fun! Fun for me, at least; though I think she had fun too, eventually. Sweet & Spicy is a family-friendly variant of an elegant bluffing game that I would highly recommend to everyone. So, too, must I recommend Sweet & Spicy. It’s adorable, it’s endearing, and it’s just fun. And if you love spices, kittens, or bluffing, you’ll likely enjoy Sweet & Spicy as well!

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