By The Book Stacking Puzzle and Chocoly Game Review

It’s only logical that if you like logic games then you’ll love playing two new games from FoxMind. Both By the Book and Chocoly require logical thinking and observation. 

By the Book is a puzzle game that challenges players to arrange the book pieces as shown on the challenge card so that the top shelf is perfectly balanced. There are 40 challenge cards, 12 book pieces, two shelves, one cat figure, and a leveler to check your work. Choose a card and place one of the shelves on a leveled surface. Select the books indicated on the card and place them onto the shelf. Place the other shelf on top and check with the level to see if it is completely balanced. The bubble in the level must be between the two center lines. There are a few rules to remember as you solve, such as the placement of the cat figure, and be sure to pay attention to the icons that indicate the number of books and/or specific books. If you’re stumped, flip over the card for one solution. However, there may be other valid ways to solve the puzzle. Maybe you’ll find one. This game is for more players ages 8 and up.

Chocoly is a game inspired by chocolate. The object is to create the largest connected chocolate bar of your own flavor. You can play the game with two to four players ages 8 and up. Shuffle the 36 chocolate tiles and stack them face down. Each player gets four tiles and then picks three tokens of the same flavor and one cocoa bean. There are 22 tokens: six caramels, six cookies, six almonds, and four cocoa beans. On your turn, place one tile on the table and draw a new tile from the deck. In order to place a tile, there must be at least one chocolate piece from the placed tile that connects to an identical chocolate piece. A tile must also fully align with at least two chocolate pieces and can touch one or more tiles. (The instructions don’t say anything about an exception for the first few pieces placed.) Only once during the game, you can use your cocoa bean token to get rid of your entire hand and draw four new tiles. Players can also use their flavor tokens to put tiles on top of other tiles to increase their chocolate area or divide an opponent’s area. There are rules for overlapping, though. You must overlap at least two tiles and connect to at least one piece of the same chocolate flavor, and your tile can’t stick out from the tiles on the table or stack on tiles with flavor tokens already on them. When all the tiles have been played, count up your largest area of chocolate pieces. The player with the biggest connected chocolate bar wins.