Cacao

We played a fun new game last night online. It's called Cacao and it's a tile placement game, a bit like Carcasonne, but with less randomness and more strategy. You have your own tiles with different numbers of workers along the edge, and jungle tiles that are open to everyone and show cacao fields, markets, temples, water holes, etc.

On your turn, you have a choice of three workers tiles you can place on the board, and then up to two jungle tiles you can place, depending on the configuration of the other tiles already placed. You score points based on the type of jungle tile and how many workers you have adjacent to it - but so do other players, if you have placed a jungle tile next to some of their workers.

So, there's a lot more choice of tiles than in Carcasonne, and the placement is more likely to end up giving other players points as well as you. There are also opportunities towards the end of the game to replace some of your own worker tiles in order to score more points.

It was easy to pick up in terms of actual rules, but took a while to get the hang of in terms of strategy. Both games we played were quite close (the second one much more so) and it was a fun way to spend an evening. It also works really well online, as the computer highlighted all the legal moves and calculated all the points, and it was possible to move the board around and zoom in and out to get a better view.

Definitely one I'd be happy to play again.