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So I happened to land myself in a game store yesterday not but a week after buying a couple of boardgames (How do these things happen?
). As my history goes, walking in always means walking out with something in hand. This time it happened to be A la Carte. The S.O. saw it and thought it would be fun and any time the lady of our duo thinks she might enjoy a board game I usually put the money into it. Anyhow, onto the meat of this review.
Rules:
Very simple. You quite literally have three things that you can do. Roll the die to heat your stove, spice your dish, or take a coffee break. That's it. The rulebook was very concise and quick. We were up and playing within 5 minutes. All symbols and graphics were also very self explanatory so reference to the rules was little to none. Which is always a good thing.
Player Interaction
This game does offer some player interaction with the coffee breaks where you can switch stoves or spice others dishes but for the most part it's a solo game for four. There is also some player interaction when you choose what dish you decide to make next by denying someone else from cooking it. Once again, very little influence on what others do.
Strategy
This game is light. Very light. It's got a lot of luck involved and little to no strategy. With every element involving the roll of a die or the random falling of spices it's very hard to come up with a solid long term plan on how to win. The most control you have over what is going on is when you decide to use your coffee break to alter some aspect of the game.
Overall Opinion
After a couple of plays I enjoyed it and so did the girlfriend but we both agreed that the novelty of this game could wear off very quickly. It's not one that will hit the game table very often. The game play itself is very quick but the length of the game as a whole takes a little bit too long for what it is. Is it going out the door? No, not any time soon. I think that this game will stick around just so I can play it with my future kids because I can see this being a real winner with the younger game players. On a final note, the components of this game are amazing. Opening up this box and seeing what was inside brought a squeal (A manly squeal mind you
) of joy. Both of us started constructing the stoves and when everything was put together we just sat back and admired the beauty. Seriously though, the components are great, it's almost worth buying the game just to get the cool bits. So after all of that, would I recommend buying it? No, I wouldn't. Not for serious gamers that is. For families with kids, definitely. I think this game would be spot on.
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