Author Topic: Cacao board game with similarities to Carcassonne (Read 66286 times)

Elfew · « **Reply #45 on:** March 09, 2016, 11:26:27 PM »

Quote from: Decar on March 09, 2016, 06:20:22 AM

Carcassonne Chocolat + Die Lichtung are available at 10% off from Spiel Offensive!!!!

Limited numbers available - Paul - please save some for the rest of us

https://www.spiele-offensive.de/index.php?cmd=gruppendeal&grid=200

So it is just an expansion + chocolate bar? Nothing special (tiles), am I right?

Decar · « **Reply #46 on:** March 09, 2016, 11:56:20 PM »

It comes with "Chocolatl", "Die Lichtung" and some Pralinen chocolates.

jungleboy · « **Reply #47 on:** March 10, 2016, 01:44:54 AM »

Quote from: Decar on March 09, 2016, 11:56:20 PM

It comes with "Chocolatl", "Die Lichtung" and some Pralinen chocolates.

Oh right. So it's the non-tile promo that's already been released, not something new?

Decar · « **Reply #48 on:** March 10, 2016, 01:48:50 AM »

Well it was only 'released' to the publisher paetron backers, you'll have a hard time getting it if you want to be a cacao completionist :p

Plus its 10% off too. I've put together a big order so shipping isnt too painful. You can save 5€ if you're a first time ahopper too.

Elfew · « **Reply #49 on:** March 10, 2016, 02:41:07 AM »

Do you recommend this game? I am thinking about Colt Express vs Cacao

jungleboy · « **Reply #50 on:** March 10, 2016, 03:35:59 AM »

Quote from: Elfew on March 10, 2016, 02:41:07 AM

Do you recommend this game? I am thinking about Colt Express vs Cacao

I answered as best as I could in your other thread.

jungleboy · « **Reply #51 on:** March 10, 2016, 03:37:48 AM »

Quote from: Decar on March 10, 2016, 01:48:50 AM

Well it was only 'released' to the publisher paetron backers, you'll have a hard time getting it if you want to be a cacao completionist :p

Good point. As Dan discussed in the 'second chance' thread, Cacao is a new game where we can see that there is scope for many expansions, so it's probably not a bad idea to snap up everything while it's readily available. But this promo doesn't inspire me very much, which is why I haven't tried to get it up until now.

Quote from: Decar on March 10, 2016, 01:48:50 AM

Plus its 10% off too. I've put together a big order so shipping isnt too painful. You can save 5€ if you're a first time ahopper too.

€5 off and 10% off? They are basically giving it away. OK, I'll get it

Edit: But there's a €3.50 surcharge if your order is under €20.

Decar · « **Reply #52 on:** March 10, 2016, 04:37:40 AM »

So what else did you buy?

jungleboy · « **Reply #53 on:** March 10, 2016, 04:41:36 AM »

Quote from: Decar on March 10, 2016, 04:37:40 AM

So what else did you buy?

I got annoyed navigating the site with Chrome-translation and left without buying anything.

Elfew · « **Reply #54 on:** March 10, 2016, 11:38:18 AM »

So new expansion - but - you have to replace "old" tiles with the new ones - I dont think this is good approach - why to have XX expansions and promo expansion w)if you cannot play them together (At least with some of them)

jungleboy · « **Reply #55 on:** March 10, 2016, 11:45:12 AM »

Because the proportion of jungle tiles and worker tiles needs to stay more or less the same for the game to work. If there are too many jungle tiles, you'll run out of worker tiles without getting to play all the jungle tiles, and your sun disks will be useless.

Paul · « **Reply #56 on:** March 10, 2016, 11:49:43 AM »

I saw a review of this from a video posted earlier here about replacing tiles when using expansion.

It is a bit of a letdown and remains to seen if this choice is more balanced rather than adding more worker tiles.

Curt194 · « **Reply #57 on:** March 10, 2016, 01:53:37 PM »

I watched this overview earlier and actually I think it will work. For example with the irrigation module they're taking out the double plantations to make irrigation the only way to get lots of cacao making them more of a focus…I do hope some of the later expansions add more worker tiles but for now I think it's looking really good.

https://boardgamegeek.com/video/91504/cacao-chocolatl/game-overview-recorded-spielwarenmesse-2016

It certainly seems like they should add some interesting tactics to the game

Elfew · « **Reply #58 on:** March 10, 2016, 03:17:53 PM »

I just wanna make game longer with more different mechanics. Maybe in future they will release another expansion. Until that it is not my next adept for buy. Thx all for help!

Decar · « **Reply #59 on:** April 03, 2016, 01:47:03 PM »

Decided to play with 3 of the expansions in the Chocolat box this evening. It wasn't great fun reading: swap the 'such-and-such' tiles for the 'some-other-tile' and then read 'unless it's a 2-player game' in which case remove this tile instead.

I feel this could have all been done with iconography, it was quite clumsy.

We played with the Jungle-map tiles, these were quite fun a fairly basic opportunity to grab some points early when the chance came up by spending a jungle-map and getting a tile you could see but didn't have access to until later.

We also played with the chocolate expansion, basically 4 new tiles: 2 markets where you can sell cacao and chocolate for 3:7. Chocolate is made from Cacao in the Cacao milking station (which removed some mines). So Chocolate takes 2 actions but work a lot more than cacao.

This might be a great expansion, but both the Cacao Milking stations came up right at the end of the game, so neither of us could use them very efficiently, so it was a bit disappointing really. I feel like we made a mistake during setup, counting out all the tiles we should and shouldn't be using, but it felt like we were missing a few goes, using the sun tokens, but it just didn't come up.

The irrigation module was fun, it allows you to spend the most expensive resource (water) in the game to generate a lot of cacao.
I still won the game making sure my water track was maxed out by the end though.

Also the most annoying thing was the Greens don't match - can you believe that! The jungle greens are different and if you look closely the backs of the tiles are darker too

No excuses

There's still one more module to try, but I'm only rating this a

until I get change to try the chocolate module again.