Fromage review

R2i Games | 1 to 4 players | 14+ | 30 to 45 minutes

I am always a little wary of “gimmicks” in a board game. Fromage has one of those gimmicks too: a rotating game board. But this game actually turned out to be exactly the game we had been looking for for a while as an addition to our collection.

Can you put together the most beautiful, highest-scoring landscape at the table?

The game

In Fromage, on your turn you work in one of the four quadrants that is in front of you at that moment. In that quadrant you always have two options, and you can place no more than one worker on each (so two in total on your turn). The spaces come in three different slice sizes. That is because at the start of your turn, you only get back the workers whose slice is pointing in your direction. A bigger reward often means your worker is away for longer. So plan this carefully, because if you are careless, you might end up without a single worker available.

Because you can only work in the quadrant in front of you and therefore only have two actions, it is not a game that demands an enormous amount of planning either. You definitely have to plan, but you quickly see what you need and what has to happen to get it. You want a certain income and you want to make a certain cheese; there are no more options than that.

Let us start with income. In each quadrant you can get 1 type of good, namely: fruit, livestock, objective cards and building tiles. You use fruit when you make certain cheeses. Some cheeses have fruit in them, and with others you have to serve a jam. Livestock lets you make special cheeses that would otherwise not be available: a shortcut to your goals, so to speak. Objective cards speak for themselves. When you make a cheese that meets an objective card (colour and quality), you score it straight away, for extra points at the end of the game. Buildings make your actions extra strong and/or efficient. Once you have eventually filled them, you enjoy a certain advantage or score extra points at the end of the game.

Then comes making the cheeses. Your workers come in three types: a white cheese, a yellow cheese and a blue cheese. You can use them freely for the production above, but for making cheeses they are colour-specific. So that is something else to take into account in your planning. In each quadrant you make and place cheeses with a different goal. In one quadrant you play an area majority game, while elsewhere you collect sets of suitable cheeses. Your buildings may also have an influence here, so one quadrant is often more valuable to you than another. At the same time, you do not want your opponent(s) to achieve their goals without any trouble either.

Scoring

So what do you score points for? In each quadrant on its own, of course. Who has conquered the most areas, who has made the most varied combinations or who has created the largest connected area of cheeses are examples of this. Possibly combined with an unlocked building that gives this kind of scoring an extra boost. But make no mistake, this is far from always where the most points are scored.

I personally like to play for the extra scoring opportunities. They are the cherry on the cake (the raspberry on the cheese?) when it comes to your final score. For example, you multiply the number of times you used fruit for cheeses by the number of times you used fruit for jam. I can tell you, that can really add up.

We play a two-player game of Fromage in just over half an hour. That is another one of the reasons this game is so unique. Admittedly, we are fairly fast players, but it does show the pace at which the game can be played. You feel completely satisfied after a game, and you have given your brain something to do at a nice, relaxed level. The look and feel make it the perfect summer game. It is a bit as if your fellow players are very advanced automa bots in this game, but that absolutely does not spoil the fun. On the contrary: it adds to the relaxed atmosphere this game brings with it.