SNAP Review – Charcuterie

What do you think of “charcuterie”?

Do you mean, like a selection of cheese, crackers, dried meat, and fruit? It’s delicious.

But that word is too fancy. I call it a “cheese board” or a “snack board”. And let me tell you – my body is ready for those, any time.

Well, that’s good, but we’re going fancy today – because this is a SNAP review for Charcuterie, the board game.

Game

Charcuterie is a game for 2-6 players designed by Whitney Lorraine and Josh Camden, that takes about half an hour to play. The box says ages 14 and up, but it can definitely go a little younger than that.

This one’s published by Th3rd World Studios.

Art

Let’s start with the art in Charcuterie. Jola Sopek’s illustrations look absolutely DELECTABLE. Thankfully, they’re not quite realistic enough that we’ve ever taken a bite out of the components, but they do make me hungry.

I think the next time we play we should just have a… charcuterie board next to us, so we can eat while we play.
– Sounds good to me!

Anyway, in the game there are crackers, meat, six kinds of cheese, and four kinds of dip.

The player boards and central board all look like wooden cutting boards, too. The scoreboard even looks like it’s got crumbs on it!
– I keep trying to brush them off!

And don’t forget the fruits and veggies.

– Wait, tomatoes are a veggie here?

Yes, as the rulebook quotes: “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

Mechanics

OK, you’re making me hungry! Let’s move on to the mechanics. How do we play Charcuterie?

After setting out common objectives and the serving board, give each player a player board and two recipe cards. These recipes are secret endgame goals; each player picks one recipe to keep, and returns the other one.

Each player gets two turns as the “host” – they take the bag of food tiles, and pull out a certain number. You can see this table of how many tiles to take out, determined by the player count. Then the host stacks them into as many piles as there are players, with the same number of food tiles in every stack.

Starting with the next player, everyone gets to choose a stack to keep. The host gets the stack that’s left at the end.

Everyone arranges their food on their player board. Overlapping foods is fine, but each food tile needs to actually touch the board, not hang over the edge, and not be fully supported by other foods – and have at least half of the tile showing.

Once everyone has had two turns as host, you’ve got a minute left to finish arranging your boards, because – the guests are here!

Work through the public scoring objectives for each player, then everyone reveals and scores their own recipe card.

Compare scores and see who was the best host!

Expectations

Other than looking delicious, what did we expect from this game?

I’m actually not really a big I-split-you-choose guy, so I played Charcuterie mostly to support some of the people we know who worked on making this game. But I didn’t really expect to fall in love with it.

I expected this game to be more complex than it is. Making an attractive charcuterie board – in real life – is something I can’t quite get the hang of.

It’s still delicious, though.

Surprises

So, that’s kind of a surprise. What else surprised you?

Well, that it went so quickly! And even though you have a lot of scoring conditions – there are four (correction: six) public objectives and a private recipe – it didn’t feel like I had to juggle a lot in my head. It’s really easy to boil it down to something like “I want more cheeses in this group” and “I want to pair up meat and crackers”.

I definitely enjoyed Charcuterie more than I expected to. We played it while it was in development, and the team did a really good job refining the mechanics to handle edge cases a little bit differently and elegantly.

The biggest problem we ran into was when the goals either aligned too much, or not at all, and it made for kind of a frustrating game experience to feel like you were forced into taking certain things because the game basically dictated you do it.

Charcuterie boards are supposed to be about the art of the board – which is why I’m bad at them – and I did want to feel that here in this game, not just an obligation to take a certain thing because it was the “right” move, the correct thing to do.

Recommended?

Do we recommend Charcuterie?

This is a game that’s a great way to get everyone around the table, whether you’re a family looking for something that feels a little bit more “grown up”, or seasoned players wanting an appetizer before a longer game.

Like many I-split-you-choose games, there’s a lot of randomness in what comes out and when. So that can cause some frustration.

You might end up in a situation where a category of food you really want simply always gets taken before your turn. Or, you could end up in a situation where the goals are really opposite to one another, or make it impossible to fulfill both of them. This can be frustrating when one of the components of multiple goals is in short supply.

And, you probably won’t want to play this with younger kids – the objectives do require some reading.
– And they might be tempted to put some of these in their mouth!

Overall, we give Charcuterie 3½ bites out of 5.

And that’s Charcuterie – in a SNAP!

Find it on Amazon, direct from Th3rd World Studios, or at your local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Charcuterie from Th3rd World Studios for this review.

This post contains affiliate links, which do not change your price, but help support The Family Gamers.

SNAP review music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?