Tea, Scones and Arsenic review – How’s your constitution?

When your rich American uncle dies and your family is a little shady, beware of what you eat at afternoon tea. You never know what someone might do to get a little more inheritance money. Such is the premise of Tea, Scones, and Arsenic, a game from French publisher Robin Red Game and designer and illustrator Pascal Boucher.

Tea, Scones and Arsenic is a family collection game for 1-6 players. Each player starts the game with a character board featuring one member of the aforementioned aristocratic family, a tea cup, and three sugar cube tokens. In turn, players will take a scone from the central pastry box and either add it to their tea cup or put it back by expending one of their sugar cubes.

Scones will feature illustrations of different types of pastry on one side and 0-3 arsenic bottles on the other. If a player keeps a scone, it will add to its overall total of scone tokens as well as ingested arsenic. Players can only ingest so much poison before they are out of the game on the account of death. The more players in the game, the less tolerant each player becomes.

If at any time, before they draw a new scone, a player decides they have eaten enough, the endgame will trigger. Each other player will work through two more “honor rounds” where they must play. At the end of the game, any living players will count the amount of scones in their cup, with the highest number being the winner. A tie goes to the player who ingested the most poison. If still tied, there will be a sudden death pull from the center tin with poison eliminating players until one is left.

The game comes with a number of optional rules that players can include. The first module adds special scones to the tin with different conditions. These include double scoring, cures for poison, non-scoring expired scones, poisoned scones you can’t return with sugar, and a few half poisoned ones that cause instant death when paired with another half poisoned cookie. The little spoon module allows players to cancel another player’s turn once they put a scone in their tea cup. The player must then return the scone to the box and the little spoon token is discarded. Finally, a single player mode is added that gives the solo player a tolerance of 30 poison to see how many scones they can pull before expiring.

Overall Thoughts

Let's start with the production. The production of this game is very fun. The scone tokens are high quality and the box that they come in reminds me of a shortbread cookie box. The “scones” look more like English biscuits or cookies and the designer even references their “neophyte” knowledge of English pastry and the harsh sound that biscuit has to their French ears. I can appreciate a little stuck up French humor thrown in the mix. The author has some fun jokes throughout the ruleset and encourages theatrical deaths when you’ve had a little too much poison. The rules for the game come in a booklet and are translated into six different languages, showing the international mindedness of the distribution of this title. The rulebook also comes with a recipe for making scones and a history of the pastry, but sadly leaves out the arsenic.

The gameplay is light and easy to pick up and is definitely meant for families. My nieces and nephews had a good time with the game, but even for them it lost its luster after a few rounds. The additional modules add some variety to the game, but not enough to break it out again and again. Even though each player card was unique, the designer missed the opportunity to add some individual player powers that could have added some variety, but I’m not sure that would have helped. The solo mode is unnecessary and brings little thrill. Basically, it felt like a counting exercise rather than an actual game. At the end of the day, this one feels like something the quirky grandparent might keep on their shelf for when the grandkids come over for dinner once every couple of months.