I have to admit something. Uwe Rosenburg has always been one of my favourite board game designers. From simple classics like Patchwork, to resource management farm simulators like Agricola and Caverna, and even weird hex tile placement games like Applejack. That said, I haven’t gone out of my way to play everything he’s ever designed, but if a board game box has his name on the cover, you can be sure I’ll be at the very least, interested to try it.
Ora et Labora is Uwe Rosenburg’s big game from 2011. It’s a resource conversion game at heart, which you might realize when you see the 450 double-sided resource tiles sprawling across the table. Beyond the mess of cardboard, Ora et Labora features a large resource wheel overloaded with large wooden tokens, and each player has a flimsy, thin player board with a couple of cards covering some of the spaces.
Gameplay is very simple. On your turn, you take one action. You can either place one of your three pawns on one of your buildings to activate it, pay someone else to put a pawn on their building to reap the rewards, or harvest resources from one of the cards on your tableau.
Right off the bat, Uwe shows off his nonintuitive yet elegant design chops. Players take turns clockwise around the table, but to move the ‘first player’ advantage around the table, each round has the start player take two actions. In a 3 player game, it goes A, B, C, A, then round shifts, so B is the first player. B takes their turn, then C, A, and B again. It sounds complicated and obtuse, but in gameplay, it’s a pretty smooth way to keep the flow of actions moving around the table.
At set points during the game, new buildings are added to the supply. Similarly, a pair of resources aren’t available right at the beginning of the game, but get introduced a bit later. Some buildings do give you access to those resources, but they’re prohibitively expensive. If you can make it work to get access to stone early, I’m sure it would pay dividends, but never in my plays have I had the gall to chase down early access to stone.
There are just under 20 resources to play with. Some, like wood, stone, clay, and straw are used to build new buildings. Wood, peat, straw, and coke provide heat. Wine, sheep, mutton, wheat, flour, and bread all provide food. You may have caught that some resources carry double duty as both a building resource and heat source. Most of the buildings will have you spending certain resources to generate new ones, with the end goal generally being to create resources that generate the most victory points.
Ora et Labora is a sandbox that lets you choose which mix of the 20 resources you want to goose to generate the most points possible. You and your opponents can all chase different paths, and end up at nearly the same space. The freedom to choose which way can be a bit overwhelming, however. During our first play, we all spend a fair amount of time reading over each of the cards, and trying to piece together some kind of engine to chase. While there are two different sets of cards depending on the mode you choose to play (French or Irish), all the cards come out every game, so if you find an engine you particularly enjoy, you can run it in future games fairly reliably.
Interaction between players appears in two ways. First, when you take a resource, you move the resource token on the central dial. The number of rounds since that resource has last been actioned on. There is that feeling of playing chicken with your opponents that’s palpable in Uwe’s other games, such as Agricola. The pile of wood is growing larger and larger each round, how long can you let it build before using your action to take it?
The other point of interaction is the worker placement mechanism. What sets Ora et Labora apart is that everyone has the option to use everyone elses buildings, in a nice twist of friendly player interaction. Just because someone else stole the building that would be the linchpin to your engine, you can always just toss a coin or two their way and use the building anyway. There is a bit of tempo to consider when you use someone else’s buildings, however. Because you only get to take back your workers when all 3 have been deployed, choosing when to use someone else’s building to tie up their workers can be the difference between victory and defeat.
It’s kind of fascinating, returning to some of Uwe Rosenburg’s older titles. Ora et Labora features ideas and mechanics that have been reworked, reimagined, and fleshed out in newer games. The resource wheel getting an upgrade in Glass Road or Black Forest, or the dozens of resources coming in from Le Havre. These familiar mechanisms have a very distinct style to them, a brand that when you interact with the mechanism, it’s like greeting an old friend. I think Le Havre is the closest cousin to Ora et Labora, specifically with the emphasis on building buildings to give players access to a confusing tech tree of resource conversion that after 17 turns, manage to turn a lump of coal into something resembling victory points.
I really enjoyed playing Ora et Labora. At the end of each play, I felt satisfied, my brain not completely cooked, but feeling well-worked. I enjoyed building an engine, mathing out the best possible locations for my buildings, and cutting off my opponent’s access to actions or specific resources a moment before they were going to leap on them makes for some very satisfying moments. And yet, Ora et Labora doesn’t demand to be replayed. Because it feels very Uwe Rosenburg, if I have a craving for his style of game, I’m still much more inclined to pull Agricola or Le Havre off the shelf. Ora et Labora lacks features that make it unique, it doesn’t stand out from the crowd of farming themed resource management Euro games that Uwe Rosenburg has filled the niche with, all by himself.
As a conclusion, Ora et Labora is a fine game, a good game. But it doesn’t do enough to get out from the formidable shadow of Uwe Rosenburgs titans, especially Le Havre. I do think Ora et Labora stands the test of time, at no point during my plays did I feel like “this feels like a 15 year old game!”. The only thought that came through my brain was comparing how each of the mechanisms that make up this game have made appearances before and after Ora et Labora‘s initial debut.
I haven’t played all his games, but this is, for a mix of reasons, my favorite. I agree about it being similar to le Havre and to a lesser extent agricola.
I’d flip it around a bit, what’s better about the other two?
It’s been over half a year since I last played Ora et Labora, and much longer than my last play of Le Havre, but I’ll do my best to remember the nuances!
For Le Havre, I think there’s a better sense of progression. The rounds pass and more and more buildings are being added into the supply. Ora et Labora does this too, but I feel like the new buildings to scale up as dramatically as they do in Le Havre. And I like the more cutthroat nature of the worker placement. In OeL, you give someone some coins and use their building, in Le Havre, you can park your worker on a building to deny others from using it. Just that little bit more interaction gives Le Havre the edge for me.
For Agricola, I feel like it tells a much more emotional story. The rags to riches struggle, deciding between getting that second sheep now so they breed, but maybe not having enough food for the winter, it just evokes so much feeling when I play it. OeL doesn’t have that same tension, which for some people, that’s exactly why they don’t like Le Havre or Agricola. I can absolutely see why anyone would prefer Ora et Labora over any of Uwe’s other games.
Appreciate the reply and the blog! Good post, to be clear.
Been a long time since I played Le Havre now too and I remember it being close for me but just preferring Ora a smidge.
I think the blocking etc. being real, but softer, in Ora, feels like a nice level. It’s much, much more interactive than feast, but slightly crucial than Agricola.
I think you might underestimate it. For example, you can pay someone a coin to use their building, so them buying it hasn’t blocked you. But you sending their worker there *has* blocked them, potentially, for a turn or two. The flexibility of playing on each other’s boards goes both ways for blocking.
On the other hand, paying someone to go to buildings over and over is helping their tempo fairly dramatically, as you mentioned.
So it feels to me like interesting, subtle, but key interactions, while capturing a bit of Feast’s “Whoa there are so many things I can do” feeling.
I also personally connect with the theme a little more, and like the geometric element mixed with the resource conversions. I enjoy much more having the little towns at the end that almost have their stories, as if they’re dotting the French countryside, while in agricola I’m less excited about the final board.
But I now really been to get le Havre back on the table and try glass road (•‿•).
I think you’re right, in that Ora has blocking, and it’s impactful, but softer. I suspect it would become much more apparent if my group played it more, and we were all getting better, instead of just playing in the sandbox. I would be more inclined to try and master the systems if Ora et Labora was on a service like Board Game Arena, and I could easily get half a dozen games in within a quick time-span!
Def do seek out Glass Road. I really like that game.