La Patisserie Rococo

• Designers: Stefen Malz, Louis Malz
• Publisher: Eagle-Gryphon
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 14+
• Time: 60-150 min
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4wPtaVv
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Welcome back to the Rococo era! Louis XV reigns in France and is hosting a grand festival in the gardens of Versailles. Everyone is clamoring for you to provide tantalizing and delicious pastries for the event. This isn’t just about your pâtisserie – it’s about creating a presence at the most prestigious festival of the era that provides the chance to gain everlasting fame, prestige, and opportunities to gain favor with important nobles.

In La Pâtisserie Rococo, players represent the pastry shops (les pâtisseries) and pastry chefs (les pâtissiers) that are preparing pastries for sale and for show at the Versailles Garden Festival. Using the unique deck-building mechanism from Rococo, players hire staff to create recipes, acquire quality ingredients, and bake delicious desserts. Then comes the challenging decision of whether to sell these delectable creations for profit or present them for possible awards. The player who creates the most acclaimed desserts will gain fame and the respect of the king and his nobles.

To set up, place the main board on the table, and fill the Table Bonus and Special Bonus spaces with random matching tiles.  The Staff card deck is composed of the four different levels of cards, and an initial market of starred staff cards is laid out. 

Each player takes a player board and the bits in their color.  Goods markers on the three tracks are placed at the starting position.  The starting player gets 10 coins to start, and each successive player in turn order gets one more than the previous.  The four Starting Staff cards for each player are placed facedown in a deck. 

The game is played over four rounds, each with the same 4 phases:

1] Preparation – clear the lower section of the Ingredient display and move all the tiles from the upper portion down to the bottom; then refill all empty spaces with random Ingredient tiles.  Then remove recipe tiles from the rightmost two spaces, move all the recipes as far to the right as possible and then refill the empty spaces. 

2] Select Staff – Pick up your unused Staff deck and choose any 4 cards from that deck. If you don’t have enough, select all the currently unused Staff, then make a new deck from your discard pile and choose until you have 4.   Then, the start player deals out N+2 staff cards onto Baking Tray A and then the player to the Right of the start player deals N+2 cards onto Baking tray B.  Those players look at the cards on their tray, choose one card from the tray and then pass the tray in the direction shown on the tray.  The Trays move around the table until all players have chosen one from each.  The leftover cards are moved to the Hire Staff spaces on the main board.  Now, all players discard one of their 6 current hand cards – these discards are out of the game.

3] Perform Actions – In turn order, players will play a Staff card from their hand and then take an associate action.  There are two levels of Staff cards (gold Patissiers and gray Assistants).  Some actions can only be done by Patissieres, some can only be done by Assistants and a few can be done by either type.   After you take the main action, you can use the Staff Bonus action printed on the card itself.  There are 9 different main actions

• Acquire Recipes – pay for 1 or 2 Recipes from the display and put them at the top of your player board (max 3).  If there are 3+ empty spaces in the Recipe track, shift all to the right and refill. 

• Acquire Ingredients – pay for 1 Ingredient tile from the display; the price depends on which row you take the tile from and how many tiles were in the row before you took it.
• Buy Goods – choose one type of good and buy one or more units (price chart on player board)
• Bake – Finish 1 or 2 Recipes by spending raw materials and discarding needed Ingredient tiles. Finished Recipes are flipped over to the baked side and must be placed on a cooling rack on your board.

• Decorate – Decorate 1 or 2 finished Recipes on your cooling Racks, discarding Ingredient tiles with the needed decorations.  Note it is not necessary to decorate a finished Recipe
• Deliver – You can either Sell your Pastries (for 5 coins per prestige point on the bake) or Present your Pastry to the Nobles by putting it on an empty space on a presentation table. You may gain a bonus printed on the space, as well as a bonus if your bake meets the criteria of the bonus tile at that table.  You place a marker of your color on the bake so that you will remember to score the VPs for it at game end.  If you have markers in adjacent Service Staff places, you can pay 3 coins to gain a point.  In either case, if your bake has a decorative topping, move that topping to one of the five spaces to the left of your player board.

• Hire – Pay for a Staff card from the display on the board, or take one of the starred Staff cards if you meet the requirements for it (max 1 starred card per game).  Add this card to your Unused Staff pile
• Give Notice – Remove one card from your Staff (though you must always have at least 4) and gain 4 or 6 coins depending on the level of training. 
• Place Service Staff or Noble Host – Put a marker down in a Service Staff spot, paying the cost shown on the space and then gaining the bonus shown.  Alternatively, place one of your markers on a Noble Host spot, again paying the cost as shown on the space.

After you have taken your main action and your card’s special action, check the bonus tiles – if you have met the criteria on any of them, place one of your markers on the most valuable remaining space on its track. 

4] Gain Income – Each player gains a basic income of 5 coins. Additional income is gained for Topping Tiles to the left of the player board as well as for occupied Noble Host spaces on the main board.  If this isn’t the final round, rotate the start player marker and discard all Staff cards from the Hire Staff display.

At the end of the fourth round, the game moves into final scoring.

• Sell all undelivered finished Pastries for 5 coins per VP
• Turn in 10 coins for 1 VP
• For each presentation table, the players with the most and second most Pastries at each score points. Ties broken in favor of the player who played closest to the bonus tile
• Noble Hosts score VPs equal to the number of opponents who have placed a Service Staff marker
• Gain VPs wherever your ownership markers are (finished pastries, Service Staff Spaces, Noble Host spaces, Special Bonus tiles)

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most coins left over.

My thoughts on the game

So, Rococo was a game that I quite liked when it came out – umm, way back in 2013 – but as with most games (even the really good ones), it ended up on one of the back shelves in the game collection as newer games continued to come in.  I remember talking about the deluxe edition that came out in 2020, but with Covid (and the fact I still owned the original), I never played that version. I was happy to hear that there was a re-imagining of the game with this newest version. Now, instead of dresses, we’re making pastries. And that’s a theme I can totally get behind. 

As with its predecessor, there are a lot of things to consider in La Patisserie Rococo (LPR).  You’ll spend a good portion of the game in recipe fulfillment – after all, you have to make those pastries to compete.  It’s a bit convoluted as you have to procure both recipes as well as ingredients.  And then once you have baked them, you have to decide whether or not to decorate them or not.  It takes extra time to make them pretty, but it also increases the value.  

Once you’ve got them done, then you enter them into the area control contests.  Timing is also important here as you’ll have the best selection of table spaces if you finish earlier.  You might want to be closest to the front for tiebreaker priority OR you might want to place on the other side of the table to get the valuable bonuses on that end.  Of course, if you’re short on cash, you might just need to sell them for money. Don’t forget about the bonus tiles as you’re racing for the points on those as well!

While you’re trying to juggle all of these demands, you also have to figure out your strategy on action selection.  There is a mild deck building element to the game as you add two cards your chosen hand each round and then trash one.  I like the way (as with Rococo) that you get to look through your entire unused card inventory to choose the cards that you want to use in a round.  With everything else going on, at least I’m not reliant on luck of the draw too!

The new drafting system is also intriguing as it helps even out any turn order disadvantage.  The player who goes last in each round has the best selection of the better cards in the draft for that round, and I think this is an elegant way to deal with any possible turn order issues.  The only downside of this draft is that it does add a bit to the length of the game as it is an important decision that will take time as each player looks at their selection of cards.

So, it’s important to choose at least one card each round that you don’t want any more as you’re forced to trash something – and in general, the staff cards that you are drafting will be strictly better than the ones you currently have.  Of course, it’s hard to really feel like you’re deck building when you only have four rounds in the game and you don’t even cycle your deck every round.  Sure, you’re adding new things all the time, but there aren’t enough iterations of the deck to really make it feel like you’re building a long term strategy.  It’s more that you’re adding the cards each round that work best for you at that moment.

And speaking of those staff cards, I do try to make sure that newbies realize that most of the final level of cards are end-game bonuses.  I think it’s safe to say that more than half of a player’s final score will come from the endgame scoring (these endgame staff cards, area majority points, ownership markers) – so new players should not get overly caught up on points during the game.

The artwork and presentation of the game is functional.  The artwork here doesn’t feel quite as grand as Rococo, but it does feel like a fancy country fair or picnic with all the tables.  There are lots of icons on the cards/board, and most of them are easy to grok.  There is a helpful icon summary for the ones you can’t figure out.

My one complaint here would be that the lettering on the cards – the A for apprentice and P for Patissier are ridiculously hard to distinguish.  Yes, I know the background of the cards are different, but the Rococo font used is really hard to read.  Good old Times Roman would have been a much better choice for my old eyes here.

It’s important to have a mix of A’s and P’s in your hand as there are certain actions that can only be done by certain types of employees.  In addition to the hard-to-distinguish letters on the cards, I do wish that there was some sort of icon reminder on the board in the areas of the actions to remind you.  Sure, there is a player aid that tells you too, but there could have been a bit more clarity with this.

La Patisserie Rococo is a nice new version that uses a lot of the mechanics of Rococo yet is different enough to merit the new game.  Is it more streamlined?  Honestly, not really.  There are a lot of steps required to make a pastry and then decide what to do with it.  But, that’s really one of the attractions of the game for the people who like it.  If you don’t want that sort of thing, go play Splendor or Carcassonne…  If you’re looking for a crunchy game, be sure to give this a look.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, John P
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4wPtaVv