How to Play Fromage

Fromage is a cheese placement game. You want to place out cheese every turn to score you the most points that you can. But there are certain rules as to how you can place out your cheese. And that’s where some of the strategy of the game comes in. But let’s dive into the basics of it first.

Placing Workers

On your turn you spend workers to activate different spots. One of things you can do every turn is make cheese. You spend a worker and a cheese token. Then you can also gather resources with another one of your workers. These resources are either livestock, building materials, order cards, or berries. And finally, you can spend a worker to activate a building, if you have a building to activate. When you place down a worker to make cheese you also spend a cheese token that you have. When someone is out of cheese tokens that is the end of the game.

The spots you can place a worker does have another feature to it as well. When you place a worker, it might be pointing across the board, or to the left or the right. The board will rotate after each player has placed each turn. And players place all at once. When your wedge of cheese/worker is pointing at you, it comes back off the board.

The Game Board

The game board is interesting as well and important for how the game plays. The board is split into four sections, so each player is going to have one section that is pointed at themselves. Each section is going to give you points in a different way.

One is more area control where you get benefits for having the most cheese in some areas. The other gives you a choice, more points for putting your cheese on one side of the cheese display, or more resources that you get if you put them on the other side. The third one is about creating pairs of cheese. And the final one is creating a path of cheese around a section of the board.

Scoring Points

So each section of the boards is one of the ways that you will score points. When you score points in a few other ways. One is that you can build a building that will give you points. Then you also get points for completing order cards. Finally, you score points for making cheese that is fruited or that is with jam. The berries will score points for fruiting and jam by multiplying the number you fruited with the number you turned into jam. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

What Doesn’t Work

This is a weirdly simple game, but also slightly complex game. I think that getting down scoring for each section, at least on BGA, can be a bit tricky. You want to make cheese and sometimes the best option isn’t to make cheese. Plus you need to think not only about what scores you points but when you’ll be getting your workers back because you can do one action per worker and you really don’t want to get stuck with zero workers one rotation. So what you do is simple but with the scoring it can be a bit more than it feels like. It’s not a real negative, just that you’ll likely learn scoring after a game or two.

What Works

I like the speed and simplicity of your worker placement. You do have choices where you can place your worker, but not too many. And you need to think about getting your workers back, like I mentioned. So a lot of the time how many spots you actually want to move is going to be fairly limited. Add in that everyone goes at once means that the game turns are only as slow as the slowest player that turn.

I like the timing mechanism of placing workers. I could place all my workers out, or as many as I can, turn one and not get them back until turn four if I wanted. That is going to be a poor decision, most likely, but you could do that. Or I decide that I really want to gain, let’s say, three cows. That means because I’m waiting a while for that worker to come back, I’m playing less powerful options or more specific options the next couple of rounds. It’s a great balancing puzzle of when you get a lot of resources or a harder to make cheese versus when you just want your workers back for the next round.

One last element that I like, and I like more in the game, but to highlight, is how you start to become different throughout the game. You might unlock a different building or just have different buildings than your opponents. That means that you get a specific bonus or an extra worker placement spot to use. And that I think is a fun element for a game like this. It doesn’t make you completely different from the other players, but just gives you a different way to hone your strategy.

Who Is Fromage For?

I think Fromage is a pretty solid welcoming game. Like I said in the what doesn’t work, scoring for each section might take a new player a game to figure out. But what you do on your turn is simple enough. Place a worker once to make cheese. Place a worker once to gather resources, and place a worker once to use a building if you have one. It’s really just that simple so it’s a fun theme that I think a lot of people are going to love. But for more seasoned gamers, it’s still going to be fun because you get an interesting strategy as to how you place out your workers and when you get workers back.

My Final Thoughts on Fromage

There’s one element that makes this a very solid game. I like it, let’s start out with that. But I think the best element of the game is how you get your workers back. That timing puzzle of when you put down a worker who might take another turn to get there, versus getting it back next turn, it’s fun. And you generally don’t want to get a turn with no or one worker, but it might be worth it to score a lot of points some time.

And I feel like each way that you score, whether it’s berries, which can be really high scoring, or in a section, they all give you good ways to get points without feeling broken. So one game I might decide to push hard on that area control board and make sure I get as much cheese on there as I can. Or I might play it smart with the adjacency part of the board, or I could just go for fruited cheeses and jams to get the best multiplier score that I can. I decide what type of scoring I want. And the game is fast enough that if it doesn’t workout, you can always just decide to play again.

My Score: B+
Strategy: C+
Luck: D

There isn’t much luck in Fromage. Some luck in what orders you draw, but they are just one way to score that you don’t need to lean into at all, so it’s a low luck game. But it’s also not so heavy in strategy that you are planning out. But, as I said, it’s that nice balance of just enough strategy and easy and fast enough to play that I think it works well for me.

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The Game

This game has you racing to raise the temperature, oxygen levels, and flip over ocean tiles to score the most points. To do this you are playing down cards, in two different ways. The first is to select the action you are going to take. You can develop, construct, activate actions, produce income or draw cards. And they activate in that particular order. But only the ones which had cards played down activate. But on develop and construct, you are playing cards from your hand that do different things. Development cards will improve your production. The other cards can give you a one time benefit or help you build up an engine to get more cards, resources, or points.

As players you build out that engine to raise those two tracks and flip tiles. In the end, you want to play out the most points possible. But if you only focus on driving those three end game conditions, all which need to be completed, early in the game, you can end up without an engine built later. So it is a balancing act of getting points consistently versus a lot at the end.

What Doesn’t Work

Some of the pieces don’t work well in this game. Let’s run through all of them. The ocean tiles are dumb, it’s kind of a carry over from Terraforming Mars. Now, don’t get me wrong, the rewards on the tiles are nice, but the fact they are tiles is dumb. This is a card game, those tiles are just fiddly and annoying. To get to the middle ones you need to push the rest out of the way. Just give me a small deck of cards to put on the scoring board and let me flip one from the top each time to determine the rewards.

Then there are the cubes in this game. Cubes are used to track the oxygen, temperature, scores, production levels and supplies. This isn’t bad, but I have the Target version, so in the Kickstarter version on the player board for production and supplies they have a dual layer board. The Target version is flimsy cardboard. Now, that is me not spending on the Kickstarter, but I will need to upgrade my version later. And the score track and oxygen and temperature tracks, the cubes just don’t fit on them, and that I’d call bad design.

I also already want more cards in the game. I haven’t played it a ton of times, but we ran through all the cards in the first game and had to reshuffle. Now, not a major issue, but I wouldn’t mind a few more cards already. There are some cards dependent upon temperature or oxygen levels, so those aren’t played as often.

What Works

Engine Building

For me the engine building works really well. Being able to produce so much and really target different types of production to either play more cards, or make points somehow is a lot of fun. And it is a tactical engine building game. There is enough randomness in the cards that you get that you need to be able to pivot. Maybe you are getting a lot of planets to start but then draw cards that need heat, you’ll need to pivot. I like that style of engine building because I can’t go in with a single set strategy, like say Dominion.

Corporations

I also like the corporations. Any game where you start out different from everyone else, that’s fun. And I like the different types of corporations. I have played with one where I got a ton of credits but not that great a secondary power. I also have gone with one that gave me starting production in plants but way fewer credits and a solid power. So you can really decide between a wide variety of corporations when you start to tailor your game play.

Simultaneous Play

So, one thing I didn’t talk about was t hat each phase, the ones that are activated anyways, everyone does. So if I do development and you do research, we both get to do both of them. But when you play down a phase you get an extra benefit. So if I am the one who played down development, we can all play a development card, at the same time, but I get to play mine for three less cost wise. This simultaneous play really keeps the game moving. Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition isn’t the fastest game, but there is never downtime.

Is This Game Good?

I really like this game. I covered some issues but they are generally production issues. And the thing with cards, I don’t know all the cards, and I haven’t played all of them myself in my plays. I just can see myself picking a strategy and fishing for my favorite cards eventually. But the game itself is a ton of fun. I like engine building a lot, and this gives me that. I like games with little to no downtime, and I get that. And I like games that make me think about what my opponent is doing.

Going back to the picking of actions. I can decide to trigger another phase if I think you will trigger the one I want. If you need money and I need money, maybe I do research to get more cards because I’ll get money when you trigger production. So there isn’t player interaction of a negative variety, but if I’m smart I can leverage what you are doing or likely to do, to my advantage.

My Grade: A-
Gamer Grade: B+
Casual Grade: C

I think some gamers will want this game to be more like Terraforming Mars was. It’s not bad that it isn’t, but that’ll be the complaint. And for casual gamers, there is still a lot going on. It’s really fun though, and I’d recommend it for someone who is looking to take a step into some more complex games.

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