First impressions : Rokoko

Look at all the pretty pretty dresses!

Rokoko, one of the games that Jon and I were looking forward to, I think he more than me. Its a game about dress making and fashion and is an action selection game that combines deck building as well as resource gathering. Players try to manage obtaining resources to make dresses or buy decorations which will all lead to end game points. The deck building portion ties in with the action selection where each player will choose 3 cards to play for that round. Game lasts 6 rounds and there is a rather complicated end game scoring to be done and whomever has the most points will win the game. This is a 1 game impression and we had 5 players for this game. Lets take a look at what I have learnt.

As befitting of a game that is themed around dresses and suits, the board is very colorful. Art is really nice and the wooden components are satisfactory. The board can be a bit hard to read though because they wanted to make it beautiful but this may make the 5 scoring areas harder to differentiate .

Gameplay wise is rather straight forward. You draw 3 cards (from your deck if available or from the discard pile) and then in player order, each player will play 1 card from their hand. There are 5 main actions which you can use, depending on the skill level of the card you just played and then you can use the action depicted on the card. One of the main actions is obtaining new cards (which immediately allow you to play them thus increasing the number of actions you can have that round) which will constitute the deck building portion of the game. The other actions are making a dress, obtaining cloth (main resource for the game), removing the played card from your deck and getting the first player marker (only once per round).
The deck building part of the game is most interesting to me because there are cards with quite powerful actions which you can obtain during the game and they perform dual roles. Not only can the level of the card determine what you can do with it next, but they provide you extra action for that round. The downside will be they clog up your deck unnecessarily. Still this is a must if you want to do well because there are end game scoring and cards which give you instant scoring. Making the dresses is the other vital part of the game as you can either make the dress and place it in one of the 5 areas on the board OR sell it for money which is the resource in the game that provides flexibility. Coins gives you more actions and choices but that doesn't mean if you run out of coins you cannot get anything. This is because most action spaces are free if only 1 resource of that type remains.

Our game is rather skewed because Jean who was before me kept taking the first player marker (or gaining the queen's favor). That resulted in me being the 2nd player and since Jean did not take anything else from the board, effectively I was going first each round. Thus I had my pick of everything and as long as I had the money I can take almost anything. This enabled me to make many MANY dresses and score a ridiculous amount of points as the rest struggled to make do. Worst was Jillian who was ALWAYS the last player due to jean's play for the queen. Still in general, we had fun but I am sure if we played it again, it will be a different experience.

Overall, this is a medium weight game that plays in about 1.5 hours and combines 2 mechanisms uniquely together. Explaining the rules maybe tricky given the end of round scoring mechanism but not a big issue. I will look forward to playing this again, properly this time and see how it is and if there are any differences in how I feel about the game. For now though its Recommended!