Summary
👥 A game for 1 – 4 players
⏳ Playing time is 30 – 45 minutes
🏢 Publisher is R2iGames
Introduction
In Fromage, you take on the role of a French cheese maker who uses cows, fruit and buildings to produce the tastiest cheeses. You send out your workers, collect raw materials, make cheeses and ripen them on a wheel that literally sets the game board in motion. Each round consists of five stages: simultaneous action placement, turning the wheel, cheese maturation, scoring via the segments and finally the final score.
Let’s get in on the table
The round game board consists of four quarter pieces, placed randomly. Each quarter represents one of four locations: festival, fromagerie, bistro and ville, with their own actions and rewards. Find the 4 pieces that match the number of players. Use side I for your first game. Experienced players can also use side II or the 4-player layout. After this, place them in the appropriate quadrants of the board and make sure each segment points to a player, with 2 players this is opposite each other and with 4 you divide this into a square.
Place a random Customer Token on each Villes segment. Shuffle the order cards and distribute them to two trays along with the resources, place a tray on each side of the table.
Each player then gets a random player board, 15 wooden cheese tokens and 3 workers of the same colour and 3 coloured cheeses (soft, hard, blue).
Finally, each player gets resources based on the centre square of the game board:
– Take 2 resources from the segment to your left
– Take 1 resource from the segment opposite you
Place your fruit in the basket, cattle in the meadow, orders next to your board and buildings by your skills.
You are ready to make cheese!
Let’s play
Each round you start by getting back your available cheesemakers, but the workers on the game board turn back towards you (for hard cheeses this takes longer than for soft cheeses). Using your available Workers , you may perform one action Gather Resources and one Make Cheese action, in the order you want.
- Gather Resources: Think animals, fruit, buildings or order cards.
- Make cheese: Place a cheesemaker with a cheese token on the board in your active segment, the part in front of you. You immediately determine the desired ripeness: light, medium or strong (bronze, silver or gold). The more mature your cheese, the more points it scores, but the longer your worker remains occupied, as it only comes back after 1, 2 or 3 rounds.
These choices make for challenging planning, you have to think not only about what you need now, but also about where the game board will be in future rounds.
Once all players have made their choices, the game board rotates one quarter clockwise. This fixed rotation gives the game a nice rhythm: bet, wait, get back and thus try to plan as smartly as possible so that you don’t run out of actions during a round.
The game board is divided into four segments, each with its own way of scoring cheese:
- Festival: Build clusters of adjacent cheeses in a colourful market and score points for large connected areas
- Fromagerie: Place cheeses on wooden shelves, receive instant rewards and score based on variation in your placement
- Bistro: Combine cheeses in tasty combinations. Each successful pairing increases the value of your dishes
- Ville: Focus on area control: deliver cheese to different towns and score points if you are the biggest supplier somewhere
Often you use one worker for production or raw materials, and another to score in a segment. You can also place buildings on your player board that give benefits such as extra actions, bonuses or permanent upgrades.
During the game, you collect order cards: orders that require you to deliver a specific combination of cheese and maturity. If you deliver such an order correctly, you score immediate points and often a bonus.
In addition, you can collect fruit, which you process into fruit cheese or jam. At the end of the game, multiply the number of fruit cheeses by your amount of jam for a big points boost a strong strategic route to gain extra profit.
The Game Ends
ZoAs soon as a player places his 15th cheese token on the board, the final round is initiated. After one final rotation, the final score is determined:
- Points from the four segments Festival, Fromagerie, Bistro, Ville
- Extra points for completed order cards and building upgrades
- Bonus for fruit cheese × jam\
- 1 point for every 2 unused resources
The player with the most prestige wins and gets to call himself the ultimate French cheesemaker!
Conclusion & end score
Difficulty: 2.38/ 5
Re-playability: 8
Our score: 8 out of 10 dice
Fromage initially looks like a charming, thematic game about cheese making, secretly it is a bit, but underneath it is a surprising puzzle full of planning and strategic choices to be made.
What does make this game special is the rotating game board. This simple but brilliant invention ensures that time plays a crucial role. You have to think not only about what you want to do during your current turn, but also about what will be available later, when your cheesemaker returns. Each action affects several future rounds, because how long will it take you to get your worker(s) back? Sometimes that’s 1 round but it can also be 2 or 3 rounds.
The game runs smoothly and that is, of course, because of the actions that are performed simultaneously. You never have to wait long for the other players. Despite playing simultaneously, it doesn’t feel like a rushed game. Fromage offers a high replayability, both because of the four different segments of the game board, Festival, Fromagerie, Bistro and Ville, these each provide their own way of scoring but also the different cards you can use ensure that you always have to adjust your strategy with each game. Add in the order cards, fruit cheese & jam combos, and structural upgrades, and you get a game packed with different goals to achieve.
The game material is looks good, nice and sturdy components, clear iconography only the colouring could have been a bit more cheerful in our opinion. The game does fit within the atmospheric design that brings French cheese making to life. The wooden cheese tiles, colourful resource illustrations and rotating insert make the game a nice game to play.
We played the game with different player numbers, with two players it feels very competitive but with three or four players the different segments do come into their own better. We think Fromage is a fun family game, our expectations were a little higher as we were expecting some kind of new Viticulture. Because of this, it was slightly disappointing for us but that does not take away from the fact that this is just a good game.
Thanks to R2iGames for this review copy and the opportunity to write about this game.
