Jeff Allers Wants to Cuts You … a Slice of Pie

At the Nuremberg convention, Winning Moves Germany announced that one of its fall releases would be a game by BGN’s own Jeff Allers. I mentioned in a November 2007 news item that the game was called American Pie, but the published name will be different.

As for how the game came into being, Allers had been thinking about the “pie rule” used in San Marco. “My inspiration was the whole pie division problem and how I wanted another game that dealt with this tension,” he says. “Even the theme was intuitive—if you’re going to have a game about pie division, why not use the theme of actually dividing a pie?”

That’s right—American Pie has you slicing and serving pies, five pies in fact. If you’re the dealer, you deal out enough pie slices to create a pie; each slice is one of eight flavors (chocolate, cherry, key lime, etc.), and each of the flavors has a different number of cards in the deck. You then divide the pie in a number of slices equal to the number of players—but you can’t rearrange slices before cutting. At the end of the game, a player who holds more slices of a type of pie than anyone else scores points equal to the total slices of that type. During the game, you also have the opportunity to eat slices to score points. Are your eyes bigger than your stomach?

The game is still being developed—and titled—so I’ll publish a full preview closer to its publication date. I’ve played the prototype in an early version and think it’s a fantastic 15-minute game that’s perfect for non-gamers. The only thing better would be real pie!

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How about a pie idiom? Like “Easy as Pie” or “Finger in every pie.” Though, I think the first (maybe with another ‘as’ added to the front of it) would be better than the latter. Posted by Ryan Sanders on Feb 11, 2008 at 01:44 PM | #

Sounds like a very intriguing filler!  Er, subconscious wordplay notwithstanding.  :^) Posted by Nathan Morse on Feb 11, 2008 at 05:49 PM | #

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