Mince Pie Roulette

Essential learning through eating, gambling, and bribery.

Mince pies are a sweet treat that pop up each festive season in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. If you don’t live in these places and can’t be bothered to bake them, you’re lucky to find a box of standard mince pies for ten times the price. Finding myself back in the mince pie motherland in 2020, I enjoyed my first store-bought mince pie 46 days before Christmas — so easy to buy, so tasty, and so cheap! I decided to explore the relative deliciousness, Christmassyness, and price value of different brand mince pies. Enlisting the support of five teams of light gamblers, mince pie roulette was born.

How to Play Mince Pie Roulette

£10 to enter, players each receive a mince pie roulette kit delivered to their door. With five teams playing, the winner wins £50. Inside are six different numbered mince pies, instructions, and a score card. Players have approximately 24-hours in which to taste-test and evaluate the mince pies, and try to guess the price and brand of each. Mince pies are delivered within a mince-pie box, essentially giving away the brand answer of one of the mince pies. In the Results section below, the brand each team received the box of is marked with *two asterisks*. These were carefully selected to reflect the shopping habits of each player. Finally, three mince-pie trivia questions were posed in case of a tie. Answers to these are at the end of the article.

• What shape should a true Christian’s mince pie be?
• According to a 2019 survey by Konditor, which UK city eats the most mince pies over the festive season?
• How much did the world’s biggest mince pie weigh?

Tasting Notes

We chose the following four categories:

1. Design.
2. Can you taste the difference?
3. Appropriate crust to filling ratio for you.
4. How Christmassy does it make you feel?

The score of mince pies from tasting notes do not contribute to players winning mince pie roulette.

Rules

1. Don’t be a dick.
2. Bribery accepted — just call Ben.
3. Play fair.
4. Send a photo of your answers before deadline.
5. The best score for each tasting notes category is 5. Total score is out of 20.
6. Guess the prices and brands correctly to win.

With six brands of mince pie to identify together with their prices, a perfect score is 12 points. The house contemplated including the rule Don’t use google but determined that this was implicit in rules one, three, and the word ‘guess’ in rule six.

Mince Pie Analysis

According to the tasting notes teams provided, the highest scoring mince pie was the second cheapest, the Aldi classic at £1.49. The most expensive mince pie ‘Fresh Farm Food’ was bought from Thurston Farm Shop, cost £3.50, and was rated the lowest. This low score was mainly associated with its simple appearance whereas in terms of taste, it was rated equally as Waitrose and Aldi Blood Orange Crumble. In this mince pie roulette, there was no correlation between players’ perception of quality and the price of a mince pie.

Answers & Teams’ Guesses

The correct prices and brands of six mince pies

Teams’ guesses of prices and brands of six mince pies. Green indicates correct answer. Top score = 12.

Results

Three teams played fair and scored low. With The Mince Guys’ historical bias to home-baked mince pies, the house provided their mince pie roulette kit in the box of the most-difficult-to-identify brand. This remained unnoticed. Mice Eyes, Well Pie Never, and The Mince Guys all receive commendations for their fair play, efforts, and approximately equal pun-level in team names.

The score chart shows that team Little Ginger Baby Pudding Face scored the highest.

Suspiciously so….

Their word-for-word accuracy on the tie-breaker answers also suggested misconduct. What’s more, Little Ginger Baby Pudding Face took less than three hours of game play to offer a bribe of £2.50 for one answer. An independent team of investigators revealed that Little Ginger Baby Pudding Face used google. This resulted in their disqualification and an official reprimand for their expectation of Ben being a cheap bribe.

Despite having bought two boxes of Waitrose mince pies, still on the kitchen counter, The Traditional Conservative Mince Pie Eaters & Association thereof guessed the price incorrectly. Nevertheless, with Little Ginger Baby Pudding Face out of play, The Traditional Conservative Mince Pie Eaters & Association thereof, with 4 points, moved into first place. The Traditional Conservative Mince Pie Eaters & Association thereof first offered ‘£15 or so’ of bribery at five hours and 20 minutes before end of game play. Three minutes later, they increased their offer to £20. Once it was clear that The Traditional Conservative Mince Pie Eaters & Association thereof had won, Ben opened a final negotiation. The Traditional Conservative Mince Pie Eaters & Association thereof offered £25 for the exclusion of Little Ginger Baby Pudding Face. Since this had already occurred, Ben accepted the offer, crowning The Traditional Conservative Mince Pie Eaters & Association thereof winners of the £50 jackpot and losers of £25 since they would have won anyway.

Tie Breaker Answers

• What shape should a true Christian’s mince pie be? Oblong
• According to a 2019 survey by Konditor, which UK city eats the most mince pies over the festive season? Liverpool
• How much did the world’s biggest mince pie weigh?
  1.02 tonnes (2,260 lb)

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