La Casa de Caramelo

EvEvanstar1,6

This is a cute looking puzzle / recipe fulfillment game, but it felt a little too basic for me. You have a little personal board with a grid of spaces, and a personal draw pile of 15 2x1 tiles. On your turn you place a tile, which produces the things it covers, unless you cover 2 of the same icon in which case you get a bonus +1 to the action. The icons on these spaces either produce resources, get you a stairs token which is used to slide under a tile to allow placing over a ledge, reserve a recipe card from the display, or swap a resource for another resource. Then you can spend your resource tokens to fulfill recipe cards from the display. When you do so you get a 1x1 wild token that gets immediately placed and as before whatever covered then produces. Three times per game when you totally fill a level of your grid you get to take one of the endgame scoring cards. That's more or less it. The game relies heavily on what tiles wind up in your personal draw pile lining up to what flips into the recipe card display at the right time, as you have a max storage of 10 resource tokens at a time. The puzzle element is mostly, do I get two different or three of the same tokens? Do I spend four tokens for a 4vp card or six for an 8vp card? Ect. It's not un-enjoyable, I just wanted more from this game. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ☆ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ☆ Multiple plays stay interesting ☆ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★☆☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment