played for you

King Chocolate

Riches from chocolate

Six steps in the production chain from cacao to chocolate. Each player can only control four of the six production steps with his workers, so you need to cooperate in order to keep the chain working, and yet only the player with most money wins at the end of the game.

The starting ring and four production tiles are set out and behind your screen you have four workers and a starting set of production tiles.

In your turn you place a tile adjacent to one already in place, hexes of the same color form groups. If you have no tile to place, you draw one and your turn ends. Otherwise, you then can spend 3 Action points for the options Place Worker and Fill group (2AP), draw a tile (1AP) and move worker (1AP, in any order and also more than once. Production is done by moving cacao cubes from one stage to another – Pod - yellow, Bean - green, Roasting - orange, Grinding - red, Liquor – light brown, Chocolate – dark brown, always into a free circle of a group in that stage. From the chocolate stage cacao cubes go back into stock. Groups you use need not be adjacent and you need not control them. When you move cacao off a group its owner receives 1$ from the bank, moving cacao cubes off a group that is not controlled by a player gives 1$ to the active player. If the tile display cannot be replenished, the game ends immediately.

King Chocolate is an elegant, streamlined game whose simple rules allow quick access, but which demands complex tactic and decisions; the need to cooperate for your own advantage is an extremely sophisticated mechanism that makes for a high replay value, as does the modular board formed based on player decisions.

Players: 2-5

Age: 10+

Time: 60+

Designer: Stefan Alexander

Artist: Morgan Dontanville, Ron Magin, Steen

Price: ca. 52 Euro

Publisher: Mayfair Games 2015

Web: www.mayfairgames.com

Genre: Resources, worker placement

Users: With friends

Version: en

Rules: en

In-game text: no

Comments:

Topic and mechanism fit well together

Forced cooperation for your advantage

Simple rules with enormous in-game depth

Compares to:

Worker placement games with cooperative elements

Other editions:

Currently none

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0