18/10/2025
𝗖𝗵𝗼𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁 (Snovid)
Forrest Gump famously observed that life is like a box of chocolates. So is Connect 4, according to designer Sandro Blasich and publishers Snovid. Chococonnect is a Connect 4-style game with pieces representing confectionery.
The game is played on a 6 x 6 grid representing the tray insert in a chocolate box. We were very pleasantly surprised to find this playing board is a neoprene mat. The playing pieces are discs, each of which represents one of three varieties of chocolate. On a player's turn, you draw a chocolate from the bag and you slide it onto the grid from any edge. As the grid fills, sliding a chocolate will push adjacent chocolates already in the grid. The object is to create a line of orthogonally or diagonally matching chocolates; the number of chocolates needed - three, four or five - depends on the decorations.
It's simple and intuitive to play and it makes for an engrossing 10-15 minute two-player abstract strategy game. Chococonnect is playable, however, with up to four players. We were admittedly sceptical about increasing the player count beyond two. A two-player game is a tactical tussle between players on equal terms but when you introduce additional players, the player who follows the weakest player will always have an advantage. As we commented recently in our review of Word Thief (Outset Media), it's why Scrabble (Hasbro) works as a two-player game but fails as a game with three or more players. Sandro Blasich has thought of this, however, and offers an 'advanced rules' scoring option for three- and four-player multiple-round games where you score points for completing a row but the next players in turn order also scores a (reduced) number of points. The only player who scores nothing is the player who immediately preceded the player who created the row.
This 'advanced rules' scoring doesn't wholly address the advantage of following the weakest player but it definitely ameliorates it. We still prefer Choconnect as a two-player game but if you additionally reverse turn order for each round, then Choconnect does indeed work as a multi-round multiplayer game.
