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The gist of the game is simple. Collect pies and score points. To get pies, you take the end card of one of the available rows. Cards depict one of four flavors of pies, and sometimes a card will give you a bonus: "Moar!" lets you grab another available card of the same type; grabby rodent paws let you steal cards of the same type from another player. These bonuses come only on the first card you take on a turn, so don't get greedy.
In each of the three rounds, you reveal a scoring card before the round starts so that you know which flavors are worth what, with each flavor being in first, second, third, and fourth place across the four scoring cards. Only three of these cards will be used, so that blueberry payout you long for might never arrive.
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Which pie gets pinched for your first pick?
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In any case, ties are bad. Being in second is probably better than being tied for first, especially in a game with four or five players since you'll move ahead of more players than you'll fall behind — unless the rodent getting first already has the most points, of course, in which case you should definitely fight them to pie equilibrium.
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Berried Treasure — which credits Noah Cohen, Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson, and Brian Neff for "restoration" work on this early 2022 release from U.S. publisher Restoration Games — strips away the extra deck of Buried Treasure and returns to the simplicity of Das Super-Blatt, albeit with each flavor now having the same number of cards instead of slight asymmetry. This coincides with an increased player count of 2-5 instead of 2-4, but strangely Berried Treasure includes a different card layout for two players...
And this layout does nothing beneficial when it comes to gameplay. Each player can take cards only from their side of the board, except that "Moar!" lets you grab a free card from either player's side. If I'm the player at top in this random layout, I'm guaranteed to grab a majority in blue thanks to the "Moar!" in the left column — and I don't even need to rush for the blue cards since barriers prevent you from grabbing them first. I can lock in those 8 points for myself, while likely still competing in other flavors thanks to two other "Moar!"s on my side of the playing area.
I've played four two-player games on a review copy from Restoration Games, and over those twelve rounds I kept encountering situations like this in which one player has a huge flavor advantage over the other — and when that advantage occurs in the first round, it can compound in later rounds since you keep cards from round to round unless they're snatched away. Earlier versions of this design use the same card layout no matter the player count, and I think that would be a better choice here, especially since the three four-player games I've played have all been super tense, with you trying to maximize your holdings in a flavor, minimize pain, set up conflict between others, and invest in future rounds depending on which scoring cards haven't been revealed — ideally all in the same card choice!
(Admittedly, using the same layout for two-player games could also be unfair should, say, a single yellow card come up, but as long as that yellow is not on the end of a row, the two players would then be able to decide for themselves who is going to take it and what they're giving up to get it.)
Whatever the card layout, however, I would prefer the game with more than two players because then you're not playing a strict me-vs-you majority game. In a two-player game, you might be clawing to get a tie because you'd prefer than both of you score nothing compared to you getting second place, yet scoring nothing feels like...nothing. In our four-player games, the person who forced a tie among the leaders and profited from it would cheer and razz others, and those tied players, while disappointed, could appreciate the cleverness of how the cards were turned against them. With more players in this type of game, you have multiple clashing desires and emotions, so you're pulled in different directions and the majority scoring has more meaning.
For more demonstrations of gameplay and threats of box-related violence, check out this overview video:
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