Just Desserts is no Fluxx

 My journey with Just Desserts is more interesting than It has any right to be.

You see, at some point, Looney Labs was selling or giving away beta copies of the game. I want to say 2008 but I’m honestly not sure about that. It came as uncut sheets of cards.

Now, if I were to get something like that today. I would get out a paper cutter, cut everything out and laminate the lot. But when I got those sheets, that was completely outside my wheelhouse. So I just hung onto the sheets. I might even still have them somewhere. 

So it’s a game that I’ve been aware of and been interested in for a while. But it took the solitary option on Board Game Arena for me to actually try the game out.

The game consists of two decks of cards. One deck is deserts that each have one to four symbols. There are ten different symbols and are things like chocolate and nuts and spices and so on. The other deck is customers who each have specific symbol requirements, including sometimes having restrictions. Some folks are allergic to peanuts after all.

It’s a game about delivering orders. While every customer has a favorite desert that fills all their requirements, you’re usually going to have to use multiple cards to serve one customer.

I’m not bothering to go into much details it’s honestly a game that you can figure out how it works just by looking at the cards. 

I’m honestly of two minds about Just Desserts.

On the one hand, I think it has some legitimate mechanical issues. Ten symbols are a lot to juggle, particularly in a game this light. Ten symbols makes hand management mostly guess work. Being able to serve a customer becomes very luck based.

Comparing Just Desserts to Looney Labs’ flagship game Fluxx, a game famously random, I feel Just Desserts is more random with meaningfully less strategy. (Admittedly, one of the major strategies of Fluxx is churn through the deck but that’s still a strategy)

On the other hand, I do enjoy the process of the game and I like how intuitive the game play is. And I also like the card art. The game just has a good feel.

I will go back to it on BGA but if I were buying a Looney Labs card game, I’d pick a flavor of Fluxx I don’t have. That would have more success at the table.