Cacao Review

welcome to John GS games today I'll be reviewing caca in this game you'll be playing personal tiles to a board which let you execute actions on your turn as well as your opponent's turns you'll be harvesting cacao beans going to markets controlling temples and carrying a lot of water for some reason first will go over the rules and then I'll jump into my review here is the starting setup for caca this is a tiand game but there are two different types of tiles in the game we have communal Force tiles which are right here and then each player has their own stack of tiles that are in their own color they have three of these tiles in a hand that is facing only themselves I have them face up here so you can see what's going on you always begin with these two tiles in the middle of the table in this specific orientation and then you just start the game going to the first player turns are very simple in this game all a player does is select one of the tiles that is in their hand and they put it out onto the board now the only restriction is that when you put a tile out it must be adjacent only to Forest tiles so this is a legal play if there had already been a tile like this which is the purple players piece you would never be allowed to place your tile directly adjacent to it so let's say they put it down here after placing your tile you need to check to see if the forest grows now the forest only grows if there's ever an empty spot on the board that would be adjacent to two different player tiles in this case we have that spot it's right here so it's the player whose turn it is to pick one of the two face up Forest tiles and put it into that spot in this instance the red player may decide to take this tile right here and they slide it in right there and once all of these situations have been been satisfied sometimes you'll be placing multiple Forest tiles you then evaluate the tiles as you can see the starting two tiles I put down here have a single worker in each of the four sides but that's not always the case if we look over here we see that this one has single workers here and a double worker but none on this side and this one has three workers in one but two blank sides so there will always be four workers on each tile but the way they're spread out differs each worker activates once they are adjacent to a forest tile so all three of these workers will evaluate for red which means they will get one cacal bean here two cacao beans here and then this market right here lets you sell a single cacao bean for $2 uh for each of the actions performed so those are the three actions available to the red player and they get to valuate them in any order they choose so red would get one two three cacao beans which they take from the supply and then you put them on your little player board here and you see on the bottom there are slots for five different beans so you're never allowed to have more than five beans on you at one point and then this worker right here will go to the market and sell one of these beans back and get $2 for it so you put that back in your player area and money is never used for anything it's just victory points lastly you check to see if any opponent's workers get access to newly built Forest tiles in this case purple does they have this worker right here which is going to harvest two cacao beans so purple is pretty happy about that they get those even though it's not purple's turn now that Red's turn is over they flip over their own tile and bring a new tile into their Hidden Hand and then they refill the forest tile stack to two and they move clockwise to the next player's turn I fast forwarded a couple turns and I'm now going to explain all the other types of tiles that can show show up in the stack but don't worry there's not that many so now let's say that the red player takes this towel right here and they place it right there in the overall area we see there are now two different gaps where the forest is going to have to grow which means both of these face up tiles from the offer are going to get placed onto the board so let's say that the red player took the watering hole and put it right down here and took this mine and put it right here they now get to evaluate several of their actions we have two different workers that are adjacent to this mine and mines are very simple you just take money from the bank equal to whatever's inside the mine equal to the number of workers so two workers time two or four money from the bank next up is the water hole and if you look at your player board you see that there's this river that flows all the way around so for every worker that is adjacent to a water hole you move your little worker up once on the board and you see you actually start with- 10 points this brings you to ne4 so that was actually a Sixpoint move we would now reveal the next two tiles from the offer red would get a new tile in their hand and these are the last two tile types in the game now there are m that are different values and there are different Market values as well but those are pretty self-explanatory now say that purple place is their tile right here and they look up here and they take this Temple and they put it right down on the board there they would go up once on their water track but now we have this Temple here we see a six and a three and temples are endgame scoring for a majority these two workers adjacent to this Temple say that purple has two power when influencing this Temple when the game is completely over we will go over every single Temple and we will see how many different workers are adjacent to each the first place player is going to get six points and the second place player for each of these temples is going to get three the tile offer would refill and now let's just say that red has spent all their cacao beans and turn them into money at this point and it is now their turn they could go ahead and take this towel here and if they were to place it here on the board they would then need to fill two more slots and they'd have a decision to make uh if they put a tow right here they would not actually get access to it but they would be giving purple some access but let's say they take this three Market here now they might do this because they have no beans to actually sell right now so this three is not good for them and purple might also not have any cacao beans so that would be a good way to burn the use of this one worker they would not get access to any value from it and then red would also take this tile right here and put it down here and this is the sun worshipping site for each worker adjacent to the sun worshipping site the player will get one Sun token so in this case red would get two and you put it on your board and purple would go ahead and get one as you can see there are only spaces on the board for three of these so any further Sun tokens Beyond three would be wasted now that I've talked about each of the different tile types in the game let's discuss the endgame there will come a point where every single one of these Forest tiles has been placed out onto the board and there are none left in the offer however it's likely that players will have a couple turns left to go and only now that all the forest tiles are gone do we get to activate our sun tokens the way this works is on your turn you can choose to spend one of these it's not forced it's a choice while placing one of your different tiles down onto the board in order to overbuild one of the spots you've already placed on the board uh you're not not allowed to place on top of anybody else's tiles but this lets you get extra value out of a placement you might have done before for instance I can put this tile down right here and now evaluate the new tile in this case you would get three different water hole actions so this would move up one two three times for another Sixpoint swing if we look at the board and then we have one worker vying for this Temple putting them in second place and potentially getting three more points once every player has played every single tile in their stack the game ends the first thing we do once the game is over is to get points for all the temples out on the board this is viously not representative of an endgame board but we see that there is a single Temple here purple is winning it with two versus one so purple would get six money from the bank and since red is in second place they would get three money each player then looks at their water track and they either gain or lose money depending on how far they got so red would get two points in this instance and lastly each Sun token not used gets cash back to the bank for a single money now we see which player has the most money and they are the winner cacao beans are used only as a tiebreaker for my review of cacao I'm going to explain my thoughts on each item of this list starting at the top and working my way down so let's start with the Positive points and the first of these are those Sun tokens that you gather throughout the game and then allow you to overbuild on top of your previous tiles in the last couple turns of the game the reason this is great is because it has strategy to the game without these Sun tokens at all this is a purely tactical game every turn would just be how many points do I get from each tile placement maximize the points looking at the options and then that's your turn boom but having these Sun tokens you need to think about giving yourself good options for late game large overbuild you might do a somewhat suboptimal play this turn so that you know in that last turn of the game you're going to get a ton of water or you'll seal up a couple of the temples by doing an overbuild so you have a little bit to think of in the future this is still a very tactical game but the sun tokens give you some strategy to kind of latch onto and it's just a really fun thing to think about you kind of look forward the whole game to those last couple turns because they're very important they're very powerful and they're the most interesting things that you're going to do positive number two has to do with how easy this game is to teach and to understand for people who are not necessarily as familiar with board gaming in general I think it's a great introduction into tailang as a mechanic for a couple different reasons the first of which is you have a little bit of area majority with the temple scoring uh that's a thing that many thailan games have but it's not the main emphasis of this game it just touches on it a little bit so you're thinking about well if I do this do I put myself in a favorable position to be able to stay on top and get those points you also have the other options that are always in Tiel games of do I put my tile here or here or here and you really think about what are the benefits of those three things and weighing what those benefits mean to you like maybe this one gets you more points right now but this other one gets you more sun tiles which will let you do more in the late game and it does a very good job of that on top of that you don't have to worry about a bunch of illegal plays that are hard to understand uh games like car for instance you can only put your tiles in certain orientations because the roads have to match and the cities have to match this game doesn't have that at all you can rotate your tile as much as you want to and of course you have to place it next to Forest tiles and not other people's worker tiles but that's really easy to see you just glance at the board it makes a checkerboard pattern there's no problems figuring out all the legal places you can play and you spend most of your time thinking about what's the best option for me to go into so all in all this is a great Gateway game I think it teaches tailang very well and now for my one neutral point and that has to do with score clustering it seems like every time I finish the game I am surprised at how tight all of our scores are it might be the winning player with 52 and then somebody has 51 and then two people are tied at 49 the variance in score seems to rarely be more than five points which it's a bit weird right it's not necessarily a bad thing or a good thing because it makes you feel like all the different mechanics in the game might be so balanced to the point where individual decisions don't have that much of an effect like if somebody just goes crazy on the temple scoring and somebody else gets lots of cacao beans and turns them into the market it still seems like those two people come together with almost the exact same score and oftentimes a single point is going to swing the game one way or another and when you have a around 50 points in a game that seems like a very small thing you know if if your winning score was eight and you won by one point that would be a much bigger deal than if your winning score was 52 uh I don't think it detracts from the game at all it just it's a bit bit peculiar and every time I finished the game it's had me wondering what kind of effect subtle random variances have on the endgame score versus just player skill being the thing that wins the game and now for my one negative simply put to me this game has ended up being surprisingly boring I was expecting to love it I was super excited about it when I first saw it the pictures online look gorgeous I read the rules I got really excited because you have this awesome checkerboard pattern you have these tiles you have a hand of tiles unlike most games where you just draw one and put it out on the board they've got little workers on them so the orientation is important you can do things when it's not your turn because somebody else plays down and it's adjacent to a tow that you played so you get stuff when it's not even your turn oh it seemed great and I bought it and I got it and I played it and I was just very much feeling like oh that's it at the end of the game okay this is your points this is my points I lost I don't feel necessarily vested I couldn't figure out why I was not interested that first play so I played it again and I found the Sun token placement or placing tiles so that you have good Sun token placement later in the game that was kind of interesting but that game was also not terribly engaging to me the third time I played it it was kind of a similar thing over and over again and I think ultimately the problem I have is that most turns just feel like simple math problems if I go here I get six points if I go here I get four points if I go here I get three points I will place in the six-point spot my turn is over I draw a new tile and I will do it again on the next turn it seems like an ex exercise in addition which is not really what I'm looking for I want intense tough decisions and occasionally you have a spot where you're like well this is five points and this is six points but this gives me a little bit better of a shot at Temple scoring well then that's not much of a decision right you'll just do the thing for temple scoring because that's only one point difference it seems like usually the decisions that you have to make are relatively easy to evaluate and this doesn't mean that I feel like I win every time in fact I don't I've won a couple times but I just feel like it's almost like you're going through the random tiles like they come out and you play the best you can it's highly tactical you do all your little addition and then you see if you have more points than everybody else at the end of the game and it just never been engaging enough now people may argue and they may argue correctly that the sun token strategic placement for the end of the game plays is super important and that's an interesting decision but I have not found it to be interesting enough ultimately the only turns I really find myself thinking about oh this cool oh that's cool that's cool are the last two to three turns of the game when I'm spending those Sun tokens and I don't necessarily want to play a game where only two to three of the turns are really interesting to me and the other eight or so are not so ultimately it comes together into a much more boring package than I was expecting and I've definitely been surprised by that and now let's talk about replayability if you watch the negative section you probably have some idea of what I'm about to say uh and that is that I think that the replayability of this game is pretty low for me uh I felt like after playing it once I'd seen pretty much everything the game had to offer and then I played it again and that confirmed it and then I played it again and that really confirmed it and a couple more times I played it quite a few times but I think that's almost because I kept hoping that it would show something new or hoping that I would finally get it and be like Oh yeah this is great but that never happened and I just every time I played it I felt less and less like playing it again and that is kind of the definition of not being very replayable I don't think that the random uh way that the tiles come out each game is enough to make me compelled to play it again to see oh well let's see what happens this time maybe the mines will come out late or maybe the watering holes will all come out early and sure that'll modify how the game specifically plays in that one session but it does not change things enough for me now your mileage may vary if you really really like what it shows you in that first game then cool you might get a whole bunch of plays out of it but for someone like me that is probably not the case and now let's cover player count kaca plays two to four players and it seems to be very balanced in how well it plays across those different player counts it has rules to take tiles out based on the number of players you have in a two-player game you use all of your personal tiles but you take a bunch of forest tiles out versus a four player game you use all the forest tiles but you get rid of a bunch of personal tiles so the game seems to last about the same length depending on the number of players you have and that's a good thing I think that it's kind of nitpicky to really go into the differences between the different ones because they are so similar I mean the two-player game the temples are less interesting because there is just two of you going after them if one person gets first place and the other person gets second place well then that's only a three-point spread in a three-player game then you have somebody who has a six-point swing versus somebody else in General on those temples so that's more interesting and in the four player game I found that in the very very late game those last couple turns where you're doing the over bus with the sun tokens there could be a little bit of downtime because there are quite a bit of little mathematical things you have to do in your head you know counting this up that's that many points counting this up that's that many points so we could take a a little bit of time to get back to you but I would not say that that's necessarily analysis paralysis prone it just it's just a thing to keep in mind either way three is probably best but two to four is totally fine in conclusion there's no getting around at the fact that I've been somewhat disappointed by caca I was expecting a much more engaging and interesting experience than what I got I found that there are much less interesting decisions that I wanted usually just a couple in the whole game and that's not the end of the world when the game usually plays like 30 to 45 minutes it's quite quick depending on the people that you play with and there is it's fun to introduce to people who are not very experienced with board games like it's a very cool intro into tying it's very easy to get out it looks neat and it has some cool ideas I just felt like it did not come together into a package that was interesting I just I keep wanting to like it more than I end up actually liking it which saddens me I think I'll probably be keeping it for a while because it is easy to get out on the table and teach to people but for me personally I will find myself rarely volunteering it and saying let's hey guys let's play caca let's it's really cool I'm not going to be saying that I'm going to be saying oh you've never played a Tian game before well let me pull caca off the shelf and I will teach you how this whole kind of mean and genre Works in board gaming in general and then I might feed them into more interesting thail games after that so I think that your mileage will definitely vary with this one I I can't recommend it but that does not mean that it's bad I think if you and your play group really enjoy simpler Thailand games you might really enjoy this game in fact many people are very jazzed about it online I've just been not one of those people I keep wanting to find magic see what's really going on in this game that makes people so excited and it keeps just not happening to me and ultimately I think as time goes on it's just going to see less and less table time because there's just more interesting things for me to try if you'd like to see more in-depth reviews like this one as well as full game playthroughs and Vlogs please subscribe to my channel also if you'd like to become more involved with the channel you can directly support it at patreon.com jongetsgames thanks for watching