JUST DESSERTS

For those of us with a sweet tooth, dessert can be better than the main meal.  But someone has to serve those sweet treats to people, and that's where waiters come in.  Just Desserts from Looney Labs is a card game about giving customers all the desserts that they want.

There are two types of cards -- Dessert and Guests -- and the former are used to satisfy the latter.  Dessert cards have a few types of tastes (such as pie, veggies, cookies) on them.  Guests have one of six suits/colors, two or three favorite tastes, a favorite dessert (some have two favorites, some have none), and sometimes a taste they won't eat.  To win, a player has to serve three guests of the same suit, or five guests of all different suits.

At the start of the game, every player gets three Dessert cards and three Guests go face up in the center of the play area.  On a player's turn, they first draw a Dessert card and add a Guest card to the play area,  Next, they can either satisfy up to two Guests (by playing Dessert cards that match their tastes (and don't have any tastes they don't eat); playing a Guest's favorite gets you a tip of an extra Dessert card), draw an extra Dessert, card, or discard their Dessert cards and draw the same number of cards.

After a player does one of those three actions, the player discards any guests with duplicate suits until there's only one customer with one suit in the play area.  But the next player can serve whatever Guest is on top of the discard pile, so choosing the order of discards is important.

Just Desserts is a simple and fun little game.  There's a bit of strategy involved, but the gameplay is pretty straightforward.  The game is easy to learn, and it plays very quickly.  Just Desserts is a game that you'll play for something fast and easy before a longer, more complex game -- but it's still fun.

Overall grade: B
Reviewed by James Lynch