Sugar Works looks slow and pedestrian and seems to be relying on bright colours and sweetness to carry it. That is until you decide to fire it up and actually play the game of course. Then the order and organisation required to run a successful sweet and candy factory goes out of the window, and the game is then sharp enough to cut the roof of your mouth. It does its best to make you think you have made some decisions that have impact but ultimately chaos is going to reign supreme. You might even have some fun along the way.
Straight out of the box I’m charmed and intrigued by the chunky colour of the individual candies, screen printed wooden bright coloured that are big enough so that they clatter when they are dropped together on the table, tied in with a dice that could be rolled with both hands if the mood took you. Set up the board and you’re given three crates to place at the end of the basic conveyor belt spaces that each have a straight on arrow adorned on them, and each player is given a couple of conveyor tiles with different arrows on them. These tiles change how the candy on them will react, from jumping spaces forward to being removed from the board by hungry critters who have their own favourite candy. The aim here is disruption from the outset. Each player also has their own set of single conveyor tiles that can be placed to disrupt the paths the candies take as they head towards the delivery silos at the end of each row. Like introducing a box of squirrels into a room of cats and ferrets. Then it gets worse.
Or it gets better depending on where you are sitting. Or where the candy is that you were wanting to score. There’s orders to be filled, some which are filled as soon as the certain requirements are met, some that score at the end of the game and blanket orders, which are awarded based on how special orders or sales orders pan out. The key thing here is hoping that you’ve picked up the correct orders that will score that round or by the end of the game. I’m getting ahead of myself here, so it maybe helps that you understand why Sugar Works isn’t really a point scoring Euro, but more akin to a lighter above the table game where laughter is the point rather than intelligent combinations.
Conveyor belts are always going to be moving the five different colours of sweets, and players can be adding more sweets to the conveyor belts, adjusting what colour sweets appear on what belt and even adjusting the belts themselves on the properties that they have. Then we get into moving the sweets along the conveyor themselves, but in order of red, yellow, green, blue, purple. So this is very clever in my opinion. Moving all the red sweets from right to left, from the top of each column down the was until all those reds have been moved, then onto the yellows and so on and so forth.
So because we’re not moving all the sweets at once, but moving the same colour across the entire conveyor system, and that introduces bonks, (apparently a technical term which is serious and should be admired) and these bonks are where the carnage is not only invited in, but given a comfy chair and cup of coffee to bed itself in. Bonks are collisions and collisions resolve in differing ways based on which colours are interacting. A red will simply move forward if something bonks into it, but a blue moves one space down and greens travel one space up and forward. It is easy to see how these bonks can escalate and potentially change what is scoring and potentially when as well. That’s either going to spread joy or spread frustration depending on who you are playing the game with.
There’s simple introductory rules, advanced rules once you’ve mastered the basic and a solo mode that is all worth exploring. All designed to keep you coming back after you’ve tried a certain flavour.
Sugar Works is designed to be a fun, quick carnage mess of a game. There’s only five of each colour and the game ends once one colour has passed through the factory, so looking at higher player counts, there’s a chance you’ll get through the game much more quickly and rely on holding as many special orders as you can in the hope they score as the game plays before it gets back around to your turn. In higher player counts, the strategy is likely to fall away and be replaced by more mitigating than planning but for me, that’s part of the charm. Sugar Works give the impressions of complex scoring and build ups and planning, but it’s really about lighting the sugar paper and taking a step back, watching the colored candies explode. For that reason those players who like to be more proactive might bounce off Sugar Works as opposed to those who like to roll with the candy coated punches. There’s a lot of like here. Just make sure you clean you teeth afterwards.
