Dulce

Julio E. Nazario’s Dulce is a game of planting fields, harvesting, and using the crops to make various pâtisserie and confectionery items. A game can accommodate 1-4 players and typically takes about half an hour.

How To Play

Everyone has an identical farm board, and a stack of 24 numbered multi-use cards. One player shuffles their cards and sets aside four of them at random, and on each turn reveals a new number. Every player then decides individually which of three things to do with their own copy of that card (not unlike the mechanism in Libertalia).

You can use the back of the card to plant fields. Fit the 2×2 card onto your 4×4 farm board, overlapping if you want to, and place new crop cubes to match the symbols. (If you overlap an existing non-matching cube, you lose that cube, but it goes to feed the chicken-more on that later.)

You can lay the card front-up next to your farm, to start a new café. These will use your crops and gain you points.

Lastly, you can discard the card, and choose to harvest. Choose one row or column of the farm board, and pick up all the cubes in it. Then lay them out in the matching ingredient spaces of your cafés. Anything you can’t place is lost (but it feeds the chicken). In that case you can go on to score: first, collect as many eggs as you want and can take (for each three times the chicken’s been fed, you may receive a white egg cube, which you can place as a wildcard on any ingredient space) Then, pick one of your cafés with all its ingredient spaces full. It scores you a point, and each ingredient creates a leftover. For example, if you used a space that needs pure bean from the fields (three rings), there will be left-over ground bean (two rings)-which you can use to fill a matching empty 2- or 1-ring space on a different café, or to feed the chicken again for a future scoring turn. Eggs don’t produce leftovers, though: you just use them once, and they’re gone. Keep doing this until you have no cafés you can score; but if you’re able to refill a café’s spaces during the turn, you can score it more than once in the same scoring phase.

The game is over when twenty cards have been played.

Components

The cards are pleasant to look at, with charming artwork by Justine Norré. However, you will need to match the four crop cubes to their corresponding colours on field cards and cafés, and this can be tricky: the colours are white, cream, brownish-grey, light brown and dark brown, these aren’t a great match for the colours printed on the cards, and in poor lighting or with vision deficits it’s not always very clear what should go where. (Also, when was coffee brownish-grey?) Perhaps pieces shaped like the beans they represent, which are also shown on the cards, would have made this game rather more widely accessible. BoardGameGeek sells a piece upgrade kit.

Gameplay

This is a game of combo-building: you want to set up cafés to use as many of your crops as possible, first as pure bean, then as ground bean, then as butter, to maximise your scoring potential.

It’s not an interactive game. You’ll never need even to look at another player’s board-which can be good, in that a four-player game doesn’t take noticeably longer than a solo game in which you try to beat a set score. (If you had multiple copies, you could run a larger game by calling out the number to more players.) In turn this means that if someone makes a mistake and doesn’t notice nobody else is likely to spot it.

In spite of the fairly straightforward mechanics, as least once you’ve grasped the scoring and by-product system, there’s room for strategy here. Are you going to grow all four crops, or concentrate on two or three? How should you lay out your fields so that you produce all the crops you need at the same time? Score frequently and then play more crops in the fields, or build a giant combination chain to score lots of points at once? The cards may run against you, but they’re running against everyone else in just the same way.

With only 20 turns, every action is important, and it’s common to see final scores differing only by a point or two.

The theme is pretty loose-don’t expect a farming simulator or café management game. But it’s relaxing, and makes a change from games of violent conflict.

This game is just a little too long and thinky to be a filler (you wouldn’t want to stop and score up half-way through, because some strategies might take most of the game to pay off), but too short to be the main event of a gaming evening; it’s best as part of a longer session when there’s time to play a mix of long and short games.