Designer:  Ben Rosset, Matthew O'Malley

Art: Andrew Nerger, Jeffrey Chin

Publisher: R2i | Allplay

1-4 players | 45 min | ages 14+ | MSRP $50 | BGG Listing

Time to teach/learn: 8-10 minutes

Game Synopsis

In the pantheon of French cuisine, there is a holy Trinity: wine, bread, and cheese. As a small cheesemaker in France, you want your work to be admired, respected, and (most of all) savored by palates far and wide.

Assign your staff to a rotating game board shaped like a wheel of cheese, one wedge at a time. You’ll gather ingredients and provide hard, soft and blue cheeses to your patrons. Each wedge provides a different audience and a different way to score - a shop, a restaurant, a festival or a distributor.

How will you enhance your operation? New equipment? Larger milking stations? New recipes or special orders? Timing is the key. Strike a balance  between competing forces and you’ll carve out a prestigious place in France  for your Fromagerie!

Why We Love Fromage

Every decision in Fromage involves and revolves around time. The orientation of each board space will determine the quality of the action you perform. Good action spaces are bronze. better action spaces are silver, and the best action spaces are gold. The better the action space you choose with your worker, the longer you will be without that worker. As the board rotates each turn, you will only retrieve the workers facing you. Your challenge is deciding when and how to allocate your staff, knowing that in order to benefit the most, you must be willing to do without that worker for three turns.

Each wedge on the board offers a unique scoring system and you’ll only get a chance to place there every four turns. Where do you focus your efforts? And how long can you afford to be without your full staff? Mid game, you may have only one or even none of your workers to place on a given turn. This is not a catastrophe at all, though. Fromage is often a game of patience.  A boring turn is not necessarily a bad turn because the payoff that comes later may well be worth the wait. The game is a beautiful dance between quality and time and you’ll feel this challenge and pressure from the very first turn.

The modular nature of the cheese wedge game board and the individual player boards plus the addition of equipment tiles that can be drafted to replace existing abilities, allow fromage to offer a new experience with every play.

Managing resources from turn to turn is a constant challenge in fromage. Livestock can unlock milking stations, which trigger extra placement on scoring wedges. Fruit is a form of currency needed to place your staff on certain spaces on the board. Barns allow you to upgrade your farm with new abilities. Order cards offer the chance to build an additional scoring engine provided you can fill them. Each of these resources is tied to a specific wedge of the game board, so your access is limited as the wheel turns.

Anticipation, planning and patience are the keys to quality cheese.

The joy of the game comes each time the cheese wheel turns and you realize all your workers are coming home for you to use again on a new board and in a new way. Every way you slice it, Fromage leads to an immersive and ever changing array of fun and meaningful decisions.

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Congratulations to the designers and publishers!

More information on Fromage at Allplay!

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