King Chocolate has you try and become just that.
Can you take advantage of your competitors in this process?
You know there is money in chocolate, but it doesn’t just grow on trees. You need to control the links in the production chain to get your cut of the cash, to make sure the cocoa flows through your businesses instead of your competitors’.
King Chocolate Game Overview
Quick Rules Summary
There is a circle of hexes on the table, each with a number ranging from one to six representing the Steps in Cocoa production.
On a player’s turn, they add a tile made up of two hexes to this play area and then they have 3 action points.
For 2 action points, a player can place a worker onto an unpopulated set of connected hexes of the same number and populate those tiles with cubes.
1 action point, a player can produce by either adding cubes to a group of “Step 1” tiles or by moving all cubes on one step to the next step, Or they can return them from step 6, back to the supply.
For each cube moved, the owner, meaning the player with a meeple in that group, will gain $1 per cube moved.
For 1 action a player can draw a tile or move one of their worker meeples from one group to another.
How do you win?
When the stack of tiles has run out the player with the most money wins.
Main Mechanisms
Action-point alliance is not my favourite, especially when the game doesn’t provide a way to track your used AP spent so far.
USP
Nothing really when looking from 2025, but maybe in 2015 which wasn’t that long ago, some of this hadn’t been done before. To me, it’s just another abstract game.
Theme
It’s the production process of making chocolate which all makes sense. But as I said, this is fairly abstracted out.
Setup
Put the starting ring out, shuffle the tiles and give each player their meeples and screen. Job done.
Components & Artwork
I just wrote that this game is from 2015. but before looking at that I had assumed it was closer to 2005. The plain box cover, the average art and graphic design and very standard components had “20-year-old game” written all over it.
Ease of Teaching
The rules are quite simple and pretty much everything is on the back of the player screen.
What needs to be taught, and with 4 players new to the game this didn’t happen, is how to (and the importance of) exploiting/helping each other gain points.
Similar Games
Take your pick! Pick an abstract game and run with it.
I would personally run with Via Nebula. It’s not exactly the same being a more pick-up-and-deliver style game with a bit of route building but the piggybacking off other players’ work gives me the same feeling.
King Chocolate Review
Positives
Simple gameplay.
Some good ideas, especially around player interaction.
Negatives
It needs multiple plays by all participants to get anything from this.
Looks dated.
Is one of many similar games and a lot do it better.
Summary
Not for me.
Jesta ThaRogue