The late 00’s and early 2010’s were a beige time in board games. Lots of board games with shades of brown and themes about trading spices and goods for prestige in the Mediterranean. Let’s not forget all the covers with grumpy men staring either at you, or off into the distance. Rococo, designed by Matthias Cramer, Stefan Malz, and Louis Malz and published by eggertspiele in 2013 decided to buck this trend by having a beige cover with a woman staring at you instead. Oh, also instead of trading spices, you’re trading silks, threads, and laces as you craft ballroom gowns to sell for cash or rent for prestige.

Rococo is a euro game through and through, but a bit of an interesting take on deck building. Each round, you pick up your whole deck of employee cards and choose 3 to put into your hand. These employee tasks allow you to preform one of the six main actions, but not all employees can preform every action. Masters can do everything, apprentices can do most of the actions, excluding only crafting master dresses and hiring new employees. Journeymen are cut off from seeking the Queens Favour, and from making dresses entirely.

To take an action, you must play one card from your hand and then choose one of the six main actions. Taking the queen’s favour earns you 5 Lirve (the currency for Rococo) and you get to go first next round. Visiting the silk market allows you to take silks, or, discard the silk tile for thread and laces. All of which are important for building the dresses. Building dresses is another main action, where you pick one blueprint from the row along the bottom of the board, turn in the required resources, then either sell the dress for cash, or rent it out and place it in the hall in an area majority contest that will net you a small amount of prestige. Each round, there are 4 employee cards available for purchase, and this action can only be taken by a master. When you buy an employee card, they do go right into your hand, so you can use their ability on the round you purchase them. The next action is to depute a worker, which has you send them off to get a small amount of cash equal to their skill level (and removes them from your deck), and the final action is to sponsor a decoration, which just has you trading in a sum of money and placing a disc onto the board.

Most of the employee cards also have a special ability that gets activated after you preform the main action. These can be as pedestrian as earning you a single coin for their labour, while others will net you resources, or allow you to preform a specific main action with a discount. Each player takes a turn playing an employee card, doing one action, then activating the employee bonus, and their turn is over. Once all players run out of cards, the round ends. After 7 rounds, the game ends, and the player with the most prestige points, is the winner.

Rococo does have some really interesting concepts. First, its approach to deck building is novel and full of control. Instead of shuffling your discard and drawing 3 cards, you get to just pick up your whole deck and choose any 3 cards you want. Once used, those employees will sit in the discard until you go through your entire deck, but still, it’s deck building without the luck of the draw.

The other aspect of Rococo that I really enjoyed was the dynamic markets. Both the resource market and the employee market cost money, but the amount of money you need to spend goes down as players buy from those markets. It creates a fascinating tempo consideration. If there’s a juicy employee that you want, is it worth 5 Livre to buy immediately? Or can you wait until someone else buys a different card so you get the employee you want for 3 Livre, or even for free if they’re the last employee available for the round.

All of the markets refresh at the start of each round instead of during gameplay, so it’s not uncommon for a market to run out of options. This creates another timing consideration. Do you take a resource from the market now? If you wait, will there even be anything left the next time your turn comes around?

Everything I’ve talked about so far is in service of the main board, where you’re making and renting dresses to people lining the halls. Each of the 5 halls will give prestige to the player who has the most dresses in that hall, as well as prestige for the dresses themselves. This is where the bulk of your points will come from.

But at the end of the day, Rococo is still a euro game. There’s not a ton of player interaction other than taking a resource from a market first, or sneaking in one last disc into a hall to secure the majority.

I think Rococo shines best at odd player counts, as having an even number of players makes the area majority aspect of the game a bit of a tit-for-tat tug of war instead of something a bit more competitive. At the same time, I don’t think having a lot of players will do the game any favours, as the entire stack of employee cards will be used no matter the player count. With more players, you’ll be stuck reusing your same basic employees again and again, leading me to think the ideal player count is 3.

Rococo is a great mid-weight euro game. It has all the familiar trademarks of other games (resource markets, deck building, recipe fulfillment), but utilizes the mechanics in novel and dynamic ways. The theme of creating dresses in 18th century France is whimsical and unique. It’s not a hard game to play, making it a good choice to play with those who have graduated past gateway games and are on their way to a more meaty affair. It doesn’t break traditions, or reinvent the wheel, making it an easy game to enjoy.