Pick-a-Pepper

About this board game

Pick-a-Pepper is a chili-themed card game for 2–4 players that takes about 30 minutes to play. Collect ingredients, build combinations of matching cards, and complete sauce tasks to earn chili points.

At the start, players receive 8–10 cards depending on the chosen difficulty level: mild, hot, or super hot. The remaining chili cards form a display, with up to three cards of the same value stacked together.

The game begins with a chili-collecting phase. Players take cards from the display and place them on their personal ingredient stacks. Whoever plays the highest combination of matching cards gets to use the display first. Once all available ingredients have been taken, the display is refilled and collecting continues until no player has cards left in hand.

In the second phase, players take their accumulated chilies back into hand. A new display of sauce tasks is revealed, and each round offers a choice: collect more ingredients or use chili-card combinations to complete a sauce task and receive chili points.

• Collect ingredients from the shared card display.
• Play matching combinations to gain access to the display first.
• Complete sauce tasks to score chili points.
• Push for hotter sauces to earn more points.

The game ends, depending on the number of players, when someone has prepared 3–6 sauces and has no chili cards remaining. The player with the most chili points wins. First released as Sauscharf, Pick-a-Pepper combines hand management, shared-card selection, and sauce completion in a compact game of spicy collection and scoring.