Matthew BaileyCandy Party is a simple, small-box game from Haba based around the idea of trying to match sweets.
The gameplay is relatively simple. You start by placing the wrapped candies face down in a three-by-four grid and putting the wooden toothbrush in the middle.
You then place all the unwrapped candies into your sweet jar, which is the base of the box, and take turns drawing. When you draw a sweet, all players simultaneously place one of their fingers on one of the sweets they think matches it. If they get it correct, they keep the sweet, which adds towards their point total.
What we essentially have here is a memory game mixed with a reaction game. It’s designed for relatively young children, with a safe “5+” on the box, but there are actually a few quirks that make it less suitable for small children than you might think. Firstly, the patterns on the sweets can be very similar. They don’t always stand out when you turn them over, and some of them look really, really samey. This meant that Henry actually struggled, and anyone who is colour-blind is going to find this pretty difficult.
If you draw a toothpaste card, the first person to pick up the toothbrush and brush their teeth (or at least pretend to) with the wooden toothbrush gets the point. Generally speaking, we’re not fans of this kind of silly extra mechanic, as we made abundantly clear in yesterday’s review, but if you like that sort of thing, it’s a nice little addition.
I think the biggest issue here—and it’s the same sort of issue you often get with a lot of these reaction-time games—is that the person who takes the sweet out of the box almost always gets the first look at the sweet, giving them a massive advantage. When you’re playing with young children, this is even harder to manage. Trying to stop them from sneaking an early peek is really difficult. There was a lot of grumbling over whether it was fair and if everyone got to see the sweet at exactly the same time.
The first person to collect three sweets wins.
And that’s it—it’s pretty simple. To be honest, I wasn’t overly keen for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the colours of the sweets are really quite similar in some cases, which didn’t make them distinctively different. The toothbrush mechanic itself is a bit odd, and we didn’t really enjoy playing with it. By our second or third playthrough, we decided to just skip using the toothbrush altogether.
In terms of component quality, I have to say I’m a little disappointed with Haba here. The toothbrush is fine, though it’s a bit strange that it looks more like an electric toothbrush head rather than a regular toothbrush due to its odd trapezium-shaped bottom. The quality of the card wasn’t amazing either—you can see in some of the photos that quite a few of the candies had splits from being punched out of the cardboard sprues, which I don’t usually expect. As usual, there’s no insert, so everything just rattles around inside the box, but I’ve almost come to ignore that these days since it’s the same with most of their releases.
It’s not terrible, I guess, but there are a lot of better games out there in this genre. While this one has the advantage of being compact and travel-friendly, I really can’t recommend it when there are so many better examples available.
