Welcome to Pie Town, an imaginary little community that only has one industry: baking amazing pies! A town 100% devoted to the art of pies sounds idyllic, but life for those running the pie shops must be uniquely challenging. How does your business stand out if you sell pies just like everyone else? Just how far will little Mom & Pop pie shops go to get a competitive edge? Having a secret recipe that is coveted by customers will be a big advantage, but it can't be easy to keep a secret in such a small town.

There are two stand out mechanics in this pie-based, economic simulation: dice workers that change throughout the game and hidden information as your greatest source of victory points.

~ Worker Placement with Dice ~

Typical worker placement games give players one set of choices: where do I place my workers?  By adding to the workers "levels" that change their effectiveness over the course of the game, the players now have a deeper choice to make: where do I place my workers and which workers are going where? Now an open action space is no longer an obvious, uninteresting choice, but a puzzle that invites players to consider each individual worker they and their opponents have at their disposal. Sending a weak worker to the Orchard may be a good choice to level them up, but they’ll be able to collect fewer Ingredients than a higher level worker.

The worker dice that change throughout the game are also designed to address a number of core issues with worker placement games. A running joke in the hobby board game community is to find how to get more workers and just do that as fast as you can no matter what. That doesn't make for interesting strategy. When hiring new workers in Pie Town there’s a real decision to be made, because new workers begin at the lowest level and the worker doing the hiring is dropped a couple of levels. This means players must choose between many weak, less effective workers or a few powerful, more effective workers. Add to that the danger of a weak worker being spied on for their Secret Recipe and blindly getting more workers doesn't sound like an obvious strategy anymore.

Another new spin that dice-based workers adds to Pie Town is that action spaces can be multidimensional. Not only do the levels of the workers change how effective that action is, but different actions can either add or remove levels to the dice, shaping each player's workers depending on what actions they want to use. Getting stronger and stronger workers is a satisfying power ramp, but choosing when to slow that growth for advantages elsewhere is a tough, but very interesting choice.

~ Hidden Information in a Euro-Style Strategy Game ~

The hidden information element of Secret Recipes makes for very interesting dynamics between players. While each player's Secret Recipe pie is the most valuable pie they can bake, once you've figured out someone else's Secret Recipe, you can start baking it, too, denying them the Ingredients they need, filling up the queue of Secret Recipe Pies to be sold, and keeping your Secret Recipe safe. The importance of not giving up this advantage provides serious tension to the game, and brings a baker's dozen of strategic questions to the table: do players send their strongest worker out first to scoop up a ton of Ingredients, or hold them back to try to spy on another player? If you only have a weak worker left but you really need those Ingredients, are you willing to risk sending them out in the Orchard if that first player is still holding back their strongest worker to spy on you? Do you bake a lot of valuable Secret Recipe pies and risk giving too much information to the other players about what Ingredients you are using? Do you play it safe and bake less valuable pies to protect your Secret Recipe?

Most euro-style, worker placement games rely on complicated systems to provide players with uncertainty and interesting interactions. Pie Town, instead, gives each player a Secret Recipe that’s hidden from the other players and is the fastest way to get Victory Points. This opens players up to conceal, deceive, and spy on each other in ways most euro-style games can't. It also injects an exciting tension to the game as players must be very strategic in how they manage their workers to protect their Secret Recipe from other players.

Now’s your chance to become the best bakery in town! Manage your workers, collect fresh ingredients, and watch out for your sneaky neighbors in Pie Town: Lies, Spies, and Apple Pies!

Daniel Fremgen is a game designer based in San Diego, CA.  Daniel started designing games with odd themes and meaty mechanics to trick his friends into playing heavy euro-games with him.  He has a day job in the biotech industry, enjoys traveling the world with his wife, and can be found on Twitter at @DobeyGames.