Dulce Review

Sweet like sugar, or too much salt?

Dulce from Stronghold Games puts players as owners of their dessert empire trying to create the best sweets around. At the start of the game, one player will remove 4 cards from their deck of 24 and shuffle. The rest of the players will not touch their cards. The first player will draw a card and the others will find the same card in their decks a la Libertalia. From here, you must decide what you will do with the card. There's three options. Simply play the factory into your tableau. Flip the card and add it onto your farm board. Or harvest. When you harvest, you'll choose a row or column and add the beans to the grid. This is where it gets fun, scoring. When you harvest you'll take those resources and put them on the factories. Each factory scores a point. The cards also have rings of various levels. A resource creates a byproduct that can be used in equal or lower levels so you can create big chain reactions. Anything left over will advance your chicken marker. You can trade in 3 chicken points for an egg/wild resource. After 20 rounds, the player with the most points will be the winner.

The Good: Dulce is a really nice puzzle. It's a quick playing game that takes some serious effort to score well. Because it's only 20 rounds every turn is important. I love the byproduct system they've put into place. Having to figure out the most optimal places to add your resources is an excellent brain burner. The solo mode is nicely done as well. It changes nothing and you're looking to beat a score.

The Okay: I wish that there was more that you could do. I'm so used to games giving players abilities and a lot of actions so playing something with only a couple choices feels wrong almost. It's a nice game don't get me wrong I just wanted more to do.

The Not So Good: This is something I rarely harp on but the box is enormous for what's in there. Most of it is taken up by a divider. It could have easily been cut in half and would have been much better. The only advantage here is that it's a gorgeous box with really clean artwork but I wish this was revisited.

Final Thoughts: Dulce is a solid game. It blends its mechanics really well and forces you to really think how best to play it. It's an excellent travel sized game with minimal setup and tear down time. For that, I really enjoyed Dulce. It's a puzzle unlike anything in my collection. I continuously find myself wanting to beat my high score.

Thanks to Stronghold Games for providing me with a review copy.