Chocoly Review

boardgamequest.com:

“Mom! Dad keeps putting almonds on my chocolate!” my tree nut-allergic son whined.

“We’re playing a game,” I protested.

“Then you can take him to the hospital if you think his allergy is a game,” she said as she walked into dining room where he and I were playing.

“No, really. It’s just a game,” I said pointing to the square cardboard tiles on the table.

“Then quit being mean to him,” she said as she rolled her eyes and he stuck his tongue out at me.

And people wonder why I like cooperative games so much…

Chocoly is a two to four player game that plays in about 15 minutes and won’t hurt kids with nut allergies (according to my playthroughs), but as the inverse-Bones McCoy: damnit [insert your name here]; I’m engineer, not a doctor.

For two- and three-player games of Chocoly, each player selects one of the three types of chocolate [caramel (brown), almond (dark), or cookies and cream (white)]. For a four player game, one flavor is neutral and players are on teams as in other two-player games such as Star Wars Rebellion, but with less combat, components, time investment, and siblings making out (Rebellion only).

Each turn you have a hand of three tiles that you choose to play one onto the slab of chocolate with a goal of building the largest continuous area of your flavor of chocolate. Tiles can be offset to other tiles but can’t overhang empty spaces. Additionally, throughout the game you can place a tile on top of existing tiles to change the board by using one of your flavor tokens. At the end of your turn, draw another tile to fill your hand back up to three.

Once per game, you can spend a cocoa bean token to discard your hand and draw anew. The old tiles go to the bottom of the stack of undrawn tiles so, unlike that