Sneaky Supper: Snack or Busted, Your Call!

I may not talk about my new found love for boardgames and TTRPGs enough, as I actively work on promoting Sinosphere created games, and help western creators produce culturally appropriate games content. It was with this hat on that I found myself at UK Games Expo this year, touching base with creators and generally looking around.

I stopped off at Capital Gains games, drawn in by their Zombie Life Insurance game (which I will be talking about soon), and found a lovely Singaporean company producing small box games with fun graphics, a wide range of subjects, quick playtimes, many of them capturing that Sinophone experience.

So many games of this type are food based. It’s a universal experience, but also carries the specificities of home. Apps and boardgames commonly draw on cooking, hot pot, buffet, dim sums, or ‘guess the dish’ mechanics, and I’ve found myself having to triple check which hotpot deck building dice game I’m playing. I get it. When there is SO MUCH content tied to culinary tradition, it’s hard to be original (says your girl as she edits another “Roll For Noodles” video). Sneaky Supper, however, is a subgenre I hadn’t seen before.

Sneaking down for a midnight snack is not necessarily an Asian only experience, but there is definitely a strong Asian moratorium on late nights and eating outside meals, draconian grandmas and uncles armed with the most dreadful of temper tantrums, to pounce on any culprit, should they be caught. And so we have Sneaky Supper, whose Chinese title 密寻宵夜 (“Secret Search for Night Snacks”), pays tribute to that unique Southeast-Asian meal of Xiaoye, where the tropical weather demands rising early, dining early and night strolls for a small bite, or the obligatory sustenance hunt after a night out. While a game based around finding snacks at night stalls might also be fun, Sneaky Supper is a push-your-luck card game for two or more players, where each nocturnal snacker has to manage cravings and recipes, as they sneak around collecting ingredients and drinks, avoid making too much sound, and attempt to be the first to collect 20 points worth of snacks.

A turn consists of turning cards over from the deck, and pushing your luck to draw up to 7 cards. These cards contain different types of food, or mishaps caused by creeping round in the dark. Should you make 4 “sound bars” of noise, your turn is over, and everyone playing gets to grab one snack from your raid, before everything else (including the hazards) gets shuffled back into the deck.  Most of the sounds come from these hazards, like bumping into items, or the dreaded “stepping on the cat”, which causes four bars of sound on its own. But sounds can also come from the snacks, like the rustling of a bag of potato chips, or the popping of a soda can.

You can negate these with ‘Caution counters’, but these are a limited resource, meaning you still have to balance risk and reward (did I mention this publisher was started by a bunch of bankers and economists?) Craving cards are hidden checklists for extra points, and recipes allow you to combine certain foods for more points still. Hand limits and decreasing rewards bring a sense of tactics, while devastating catastrophes bring additional Caution tokens, meaning sometimes it’s actually worth getting caught, in order to make the next run smoother. The game is fast, exciting, and it’s possible to go from having the least points, to being very close to winning in a single turn, if the cards behave themselves.

The ‘up to seven cards’ per turn is dressed up as sneaking through seven rooms in a house, printed on a pretty flimsy paper playmat, which doesn’t look like it’s going to hold up for a prolonged period of time. The “Recipe” cards have quite small symbols, and a cursive font that left me squinting at them from over the table. I get the idea that they look like those 1980s note cards, but this is one of those cases where accessibility and theme need to find a better balance.

Apart from the cards and mat, also included are the instructions, impressively available in separate books in both English and traditional Chinese, and a few cardboard tokens, representing both Caution counters and points, which are depicted in Dragonball-style stars on circular counters. The whole caboodle comes in a sturdy “double deck” size box (10x15cm), so perfect for throwing into a bag to play with friends.

So, let’s talk about the food cards themselves. A mix of ingredients, frozen foods and snacks, many of them are instantly recognisable, even to a Western audience. Bags of frozen fries and nuggets, loaves of bread, and even well-known chocolate ices (all brand names have been altered in typical anime fashion, so enjoy your “Wagnums”). In particular though, I loved seeing the Asian groceries, instant noodles, “Dang Dang” rice crackers, and cartons of chrysanthemum tea. None of these items look out of place or even unfamiliar to a geeky player base, but their inclusion is just nicely comforting, which seems perfect for the theme.

One particular snack, the Gem Biscuits, led to discussions with my English friends, each of us having assumed these piped icing treats were particular to our own childhood memories. I guess even in snacking, there are far more things that unite us than divide us. “Sneaking around at night, trying to fill my stomach with snacks and delicious food is something I experienced quite often as I was younger.” To the game’s designer Steve Ng, it felt intuitive to turn this into the mechanics of a game. When they tested it, they discovered just how much of a shared experience it was.

Sneaky Supper was a quick-to-learn, fun game, and I found myself actually trying to be as quiet as possible during my turn. It seems almost impossible to play without wanting to snack along, so perhaps schedule playing this for a treat day.

At time of publishing, I could not find a retailer in the UK to direct you to, to pick up a copy. While you can order a copy for £14.50 from their website, expect to pay half that again for postage. Check your local games store to see if they can order it in for you!


Posted in Articles, Events and tagged , , , , , , ,