Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
My very first review for Meeple Mountain covered the 2020 Eagle-Gryphon Games (EGG) release Rococo: Deluxe Edition, based on the original Rococo, released in 2013. Rococo, featuring players taking on the role of dressmakers in late 18th-century France, is great and the deluxe version is gloriously exotic, with some of the most beautiful components EGG has ever produced…which is saying something, since nearly all the EGG games I have tried feature handsome production elements.
I had one major complaint about the Rococo: Deluxe Edition release…here’s the quote from my original review:
“My main issue with Rococo Deluxe? The “Deluxe” part. $110 for a game like this is frankly ridiculous. Why is there not a Rococo Peasant version for, say, $50? I would buy that right now.”
The only reason I don’t own a copy of Rococo: Deluxe Edition is the price. That’s it. So, imagine my surprise when I learned that two of the three original designers of Rococo—Louis and Stefan Malz—built a game in the Rococo universe that is roughly 75% base Rococo, in a package that will retail in the $60 USD range.
You’d buy that, right?
For me, it’s a no-brainer. La Pâtisserie Rococo, the new version of the game available now via crowdfunding, uses most of the framework from the Rococo base game and delivers a family-plus strategy gaming experience in a production that should land in the $60 USD range for backers of the current crowdfunding campaign. EGG sent a “pre-production copy” (PPC) for review and after five plays—a two-player game, a three-player game, a four-player game, and two solo plays—I’m excited to share that not only is this a fun experience, but it completely replaces my need to own a copy of Rococo: Deluxe Edition.
There is one wrinkle that brings the score of the PPC down, though. We’ll come to that one last, because like all near-final editions of a game, some elements change between a crowdfunding campaign and the fulfillment process.
My, Oh My Eclair
La Pâtisserie Rococo is set in the same universe as Rococo: Deluxe Edition—Louis XV reigns over France, and the players take on the roles of “pâtisserie” (French for pastry shop) owners of the era. Over the course of four rounds, 1-5 players try to score the most points by hiring the best staff to concoct the best pastries for an audience that includes the king himself.
Like the original Rococo, La Pâtisserie Rococo is a combination of two main game mechanics: deck-building and area control.
In the most significant diversion from the mechanics of the original game, players will have the chance to both draft new employee cards (prior to the start of each round) as well as buy new employee cards from an open market during a round, as one could do in the original game. Unlike Rococo, which featured employees across three job levels (master, journeyman, apprentice), La Pâtisserie Rococo simplifies the job structure by eliminating the master employee class, instead using just two levels: pastry chef and assistant.
This means that there is no employee who can do every task featured in the game.
La Pâtisserie Rococo features area control scoring at the end of each game, as players try to get their pastry dishes onto the proper presentation tables, all while trying to outduel their opponents by strategically positioning their dishes on each table. (Yes, this is just like the original hall presence bonuses that were tied to players putting dresses in each of the five halls.) The player who can get the most dishes onto a presentation table will get a small but meaningful bonus at the end of the game, in addition to scoring points for each placed dish, much like dress scoring was tallied in the original Rococo.
On each turn in La Pâtisserie Rococo, a player will play a card from hand to take one of the game’s nine actions—gathering recipes and ingredients, baking and decorating dishes, hiring and firing staff, and delivering pastries to either the community or royalty, which will either score end-game points or earn immediate cash based on the delivery method.
Then, each staff card shows a bonus action that can be taken after (always after) the main action. This can range from simple stuff—take five coins, take one unit of flour, buy an ingredient—to scoring points or coins based on progress made during the game, complete bonus actions like delivering dishes, or converting cash into points, helpful near the end of the game.
The beauty of this system is determining who from your hand will perform an action, with limitations based on the job category.
In a fun thematic alignment to real life, the pastry chef cards can’t be used for menial tasks such as acquiring ingredients from the local market or buying goods like sugar or flour. However, only pastry chefs can decorate baked dishes. Conversely, the apprentice employees can’t be trusted to do something as important as hiring staff, but they can totally be trusted to run out and buy more butter.
One change I can get behind—the change from three employee categories in the Rococo base game, to two in La Pâtisserie Rococo. The master employees from Rococo could do all the base game’s actions, but had no bonus actions listed on their cards (well, at least the starter master employees didn’t have extra actions). The master employees were undoubtedly the best cards in the game because they could be used to do anything.
In La Pâtisserie Rococo, you will occasionally start a round with maybe one pastry chef and four apprentices…but only pastry chefs can hire new cards. Certain recipes can only be baked by pastry chefs. When the in-round card market only has one or two pastry chefs, it is always a race to grab those pastry chefs first. But buying employee cards or ingredients from a market that is full costs more than it would by waiting—and it is a big risk to gamble and wait to purchase anything, particularly in a four-player game.
The bonus actions are good, and they scale up nicely, becoming much more attractive as new cards appear in future rounds. The employees are separated by level (I, II, III, IV), and each round offers better actions that you’ll want to prioritize as play advances into later rounds. That puts pressure on players to thin their deck and rid themselves of the situationally poor employee cards that enter play at the beginning of the game. It’s hard to get through the game without taking the Give Notice action at least a couple times, in the hopes that a player can work through their better cards at least twice after drafting them into their deck.
The Change in Scenery
If what I’ve described so far sounds a lot like Rococo, it’s because La Pâtisserie Rococo is basically Rococo. However, there are a few changes worth calling out.
The first one is the Queen’s Favor. In the base game, a player could select an action that grants them becoming the first player in the next round (only available to be selected by one player in each of the game’s seven rounds). This could lead to scenarios where the same player or players go first in each round, crucial mainly for buying new employee cards. The Queen’s Favor is not available in La Pâtisserie Rococo, with the game instead moving the first player token automatically to the next player in clockwise order.
This immediately shakes up the meta of the base game, which I think is a net positive. One longtime fan of the original game joined me for a review play of the new Rococo, and he called out his desire in the old game to spend a few turns in each game taking the Queen’s Favor if it was out there. “The base game was starting to feel a little stale after 20 plays,” he said. “This [lack of selecting the Queen’s Favor] shakes it up a bit.”
The downside of this change surfaces in a three- or five-player game of La Pâtisserie Rococo—it means that one player will get the chance to go first twice in a three-player game, or not at all in a five-player game. I wasn’t bothered by that in my three-player review play, but the guy who was affected by this immediately called it out when that play ended. “I’m not saying that I lost the game because of this, but I don’t think getting two extra coins during setup [by going third in a three-player game] is nearly as nice as going first twice during the game,” this player shared during end-game scoring. Taking the first turn in a round is important, especially given the limited cards in the in-round card market.
La Pâtisserie Rococo is a slightly shorter game, in terms of actions, than base Rococo. There are four rounds in the new game, not seven, but each player will usually take five actions in each round. (A player could take less if they Give Notice—formerly, the “depute an employee” action—to an employee from their hand during a round, but I never saw that happen.) That’s one action less than the 21 minimum actions you might take in base Rococo. In both games, this changes based on the purchase of new employees, but overall, I think players will likely take fewer actions in this new iteration of the system.
But when measured against overall playtime, La Pâtisserie Rococo might be a wee bit longer, thanks to the new employee draft. During my first four-player game, using the full rules regarding the draft as players select a card from two different hands of cards before the action phase, I would estimate that the draft alone added 30 total minutes to the game. Mileage will vary here based on analysis paralysis of the table, but know that the game’s best addition does come with a price!
There are nine actions in La Pâtisserie Rococo, versus six in the base game. Strangely (but happily), this does not make the new system more complicated. It does mean that in the new game, instead of being able to simply pay ingredients (like resources from the base game) to a recipe in the market, immediately baking the dish, players have to take a separate action to both buy recipes and later bake pastries. This, plus the new decoration action, means that there are more steps needed to get a dish onto a presentation table.
I had forgotten this until I went back and re-read the rules for the base game. Still, I like this change. I found in the base Rococo game that, occasionally, players might luck into having the right resources at the right time with the flop of new dresses in the warehouse to begin a round. This is another way where turn order was incredibly consequential, making the Queen’s Favor so valuable. Here, in La Pâtisserie Rococo? You can do a little more planning in the “recipe fulfillment” area of your strategy.
The All Halls bonus from Rococo is gone. In its place, La Pâtisserie Rococo uses a public milestone system that gives more variability to goals from game to game, with six tiles included in the box and two used in each game. These tiles scale up or down based on player count, and I appreciated how these new tiles change a player’s strategy slightly from game to game.
After accounting for each player’s starting deck, the general employee deck in the base Rococo game had 28 cards. That was it. La Pâtisserie Rococo blows that out of the water with SEVENTY-SIX staff cards.
Some of them are good. Many of them are great. All of them are valuable. This means when the draft takes place to start each round, gameplay grounds almost to a halt. The decisions regarding card drafting are tough, and this may be the best reason to buy this game. Gone are the days when round three started in base Rococo, and each player had their eye on the same card…because there was only one master employee in the market and that card had a handsome bonus. Building your strategy is such a joy in La Pâtisserie Rococo, which gives it another win against the 2013 version of the game.
The Depute Your Employee action from the base game is also a fundamental shift to a different way to consider how a player builds their deck. In the base game, the card played for this action was the one that had to go. Now? You can get rid of any employee in your draw deck, hand, or discard pile, including the one you played for the action.
I regularly used this to shave less desirable cards out of my draw deck, so that I could ensure I needed to get a card or two from my discard pile in the final round of the game.
HUGE. I love this change. It also aligns with most of the deckbuilding games I play nowadays, with banish/trash abilities that allow a player to get rid of other hand cards or from the discard pile.
Mostly Fresh, Rarely Stale
La Pâtisserie Rococo feels like Rococo to me, and it solves my main issue with the original game: financial accessibility. I can proudly recommend this game to everyone in my network because I love the core systems and the $60 price point is very reasonable for a game of this quality.
In addition to the slimmed job categories of employee cards, the sheer variability here feels stronger than it did in base Rococo. There are a lot of different cards, and a few cards are always out of play, even in a five-player game. In a two-player game, more than half the available cards are not used, so the deck variability is very handsome. Add in six public milestone tiles (two used in each game), 10 presentation table bonus tokens (five used in each game), and the random draw of recipes and ingredients, and every game of La Pâtisserie Rococo has felt different.
One thing I quite enjoyed about this design is that, like the base game, there are no variable player powers. Each player starts with the same four employee cards, all with the same four bonus powers. While I am sure expansion content will eventually change this, I like that everyone starts on equal footing, save for the difference in starting money aligned with starting later in turn order. The design didn’t need to shake things up here, and I’m glad the designers stuck to their guns, in an age where it feels like some games gamble on giving players more asymmetry during setup when none is really needed.
I think La Pâtisserie Rococo is the best version of the Rococo system, in terms of mechanics. But…BUT…the graphic design choices here proved divisive across my plays. (Note: Eagle-Gryphon has confirmed that some of the visual elements below are going to change with the final version of the game that other players will see, and we have included this note in our disclosures for this article. Still, I wanted to call out some issues my groups and I had with the pre-production copy.)
Let’s start with the cards. Everyone called out the icon used for pastry chefs (a large P in the upper left hand corner of each staff card) and assistants (a large A). The P and the A are a little too cute for the game’s functional good; mixed then with a color variant that makes both employee sets a little too close in terms of the grade—the pastry chef cards are slightly brown, and the assistants are slightly blue—some players found it hard to distinguish which was which.
I didn’t face this issue, but then the bigger issue comes into play—unlike both the base game and Rococo: Deluxe Edition, the large thimbles showing which employees could take which actions do not appear next to each action in La Pâtisserie Rococo. This led to many players not realizing/remembering which employee could buy ingredients, and which could not.
I’m not sure why these icons are not shown on the main board…I thought they were great visual reminders of the limitations for each category of staff. The player aid—which is excellent, along with a larger double-sided sheet that defines all the icons on all the cards—does show the breakdown of which roles can take which actions, so the information is out there. I just wished it was everywhere, starting with the main board.
Another note about the cards. The pictures of the employees are a bit bland. Even the original game showed employees in action, making dresses, cutting cloth…you know, working. In La Pâtisserie Rococo, people are just staring straight ahead, with no background. It’s not a rich space, nor is the space taken advantage of by using a diverse mix of faces. So now there are more cards, but less going on above the bonus action pictured.
There’s nothing technically wrong with this element, it just proved to be a little dry. I don’t need flavor text, named characters, the hometown of the pastry chefs, etc. I just wanted more interesting artwork!
The ingredient tiles and the recipe tiles could use slightly larger icons, particularly ingredient tiles showing multiple ingredients. Sometimes, it is very difficult to tell if a tile is showing eggs and nuts, eggs and eggs, eggs and honeycomb, etc. Depending on your seat at the table in a larger player count game, expect some players to complain about these issues.
So, visually, La Pâtisserie Rococo is no Rococo: Deluxe Edition. Let’s be real—Ian O’Toole money is a tricky proposition when it comes to tabletop strategy game production. (O’Toole did the graphic design for the deluxe version of the original game.) And if the game’s price came down because of a few graphic design corners being skipped, count me in, because ultimately I want a great game, not one that creates price bloat that keeps it out of the hands of as many players as possible.
Unlike the 2013 version of Rococo, La Pâtisserie Rococo does come with a solo mode out of the box. That solo mode is relatively intuitive, once you know the base game—solo games play in about an hour. I preferred the interaction with a couple more players, so the great thing about this solo mode is that it can be added to a two-player game. This allows La Pâtisserie Rococo to hit my recommended player count of three even with only two human players, without much additional overhead.
La Pâtisserie Rococo is a fantastic surprise. Despite my issues with the visuals—issues that may go away in the final version of the game—the gameplay here is the definitive version of the Rococo experience. The variability, the card drafting, the theme, and the scoring balance in each of my plays means that I now have a version of Rococo that I can break out with both friends and my family any time. If you already own the base Rococo, I absolutely recommend picking up a copy of the new game. I think, for me, this will eventually replace the older version.
If you have Rococo: Deluxe Edition, this new iteration represents a harder choice. La Pâtisserie Rococo is absolutely not going for the deluxe experience, with a very intentional focus on affordability. And Rococo: Deluxe Edition includes all the original expansions to the base game and a solo mode. It would be a close call.
For me, it’s easy. I don’t own a previous version of Rococo and this version puts the Rococo system back in the marketplace. Fans of medium-weight deckbuilding games take note–La Pâtisserie Rococo is solid!
Add Comment