Sweet Mess

Welcome to the Sweet Mess baking competition. You have worked hard honing your culinary skills to get here. Now’s your chance to show the Master Chef… and the world…what you’re made of.

Sweet Mess is an action selection, resource gathering, and engine building game for 2-4 players ages 10 and up. Published by Big Kid Games.

Throughout the Sweet Mess competition, you will gather ingredients from bowls, mix them together, put them in the oven, and bake them to get awarded. The more recipes you complete, the more skillful you become and the more Cooking Points you receive. Bake them in the best possible manner to get baking bonus points. Use kitchen tools to aid you and take advantage of random kitchen events. Strap on your apron…and get ready to bake!

Start by setting up the board with ingredient bowls and populating them with ingredients of the bowl’s type. The wild super-ingredient bowl starts in a center space, face-up, and with only 1 super-ingredient.

Shuffle the Kitchen Event deck and the Recipe deck and place them next to the board. Remove a number of Recipe cards according to the number of players, then reveal the top 4.

Form a supply of Baking Bonus Tokens and give to each player 1 and a Baking Bonus reference card.

Each player also selects a player tray, an action board, and a chef character. Place your chef character on your action board along with 9 action markers in your tray.

The player who most recently ate cake, goes first.

On your turn you will choose a Pick Action to perform in order to take ingredients from a bowl. When you take ingredients out of a bowl, a mess is caused! Spread to each adjacent bowl 1 ingredient of that bowl’s type. Then flip the bowl revealing a new bowl type.

You will store picked ingredients on your Pastry Bench. Choose an open section and place the ingredients there. You cannot place ingredients on a section of your bench that already contains ingredients and a bench section cannot hold more than 4 ingredients.

When occupied, the 3 sections of your bench will give you access to Kitchen Tools. You may use these to enhance your actions.

You are competing to have the most Cooking Points at the end of the game, so baking great desserts is a must. Just return to the supply the required ingredients for a Recipe and take that card. If that Recipe requires baking time, place the card below your oven in the appropriate space. Desserts shift down 1 space at the beginning of your turn. When these desserts have finished baking on future turns, you will score them, and collect any Baking Bonus Tokens.

You can earn Baking Bonuses by baking a recipe under certain conditions, like being Creative or perfecting the Recipe. This will give you the indicated amount of Baking Bonus Tokens when the Recipe card has been scored.

You can spend these bonus tokens to use even more Kitchen Tools shown on your action board. Just pay the indicated amount of bonus tokens and use their actions.

When every 4th Recipe card is taken from the row, a Kitchen Event will trigger. Events do a number of things like adding ingredients to the board, unlocking tools, or granting the player with least number of recipe stars a super-ingredient.

When the final Recipe card is revealed, players continue to bake and impress the judges until 2 of the final 5 desserts are baked and scored.

Players then count the stars of their Recipe cards, gaining 1 Cooking Point for each,

their Baking Bonuses, gaining 1 Cooking Point for every 3 tokens,

and their Ingredient Masteries, gaining 1 Cooking Point for each.

The player with the highest total is the winner of the game!