The photos in this review were provided by the publisher, Road to Infamy Games
Cheese! Who doesn’t like cheese? The lactose intolerant, I suppose. But even then, the few friends of mine who have issues with lactose still enjoy cheese, even though it causes them pain later on down the road. I pride myself on my charcuterie boards, and will take any opportunity to put one together. I have a few friends who will casually mention how much they enjoyed my meat and cheese selection, and drop hints that ‘we should totally do that again soon’.
One of the best things to pair with a cheese platter are fun and engaging board games. Therefore, obviously I would be intrigued by a board game about cheese! When Fromage popped up on Board Game Arena, I dove right in.
In Fromage, players run a creamery and are vying for prestige by producing the most valuable and coveted wheels of fermented dairy products. The main play space in Fromage is cheese wheel that rotates players through resources gathering spots and places to showcase your cheese. This wheel limits your placement options, creating a strategic rhythm as you plan for upcoming actions. Each player has 3 cheese tokens available to them, and in this simultaneous worker placement game, you only have the option of placing your cheese workers on the segment that’s currently facing you. Then, when all players have completed their turn, the whole wheel turns a la lazy susan, and you’re faced with a whole new segment.
Now we all know that cheese takes time to make. A well aged cheddar has a depth of flavour that a freshly made cheese just can’t compare against. To simulate the aging of cheeses, your workers only come back to you when they’re facing you. Each of the action spots on the wheel will dictate a specific direction for your cheese worker to sit, so when the wheel turns, your workers will eventually face you, and you’ll be able to collect them and reuse them again.
This whole system is reminiscent of Tzolk’in, although in a much less convoluted way. You’re not trying to time out 5 separate moving gears, there’s just one wheel that spins, and placing workers just means that you’ll have them back in one, two, or three turns. There is an interesting trade-off when making that aged decision too, as you’ll sometimes really feel the need to place a 3 aged cheese in a spot, but doing so will leave you with less, or even no workers for the next turn. Choosing between having actions next turn, and filling up the specific spots to earn points, is a tough trade-off.
Each of the 4 wheel segments earns points in different ways. From pairing your cheeses together on tables, to trying to have a large contiguous area of cheeses, to having an area majority on a tiny map, choosing which of these segments to spend your time in, is an important decision. One that is most likely going to be influenced by the buildings that you draft at the start of the game.
The starting draft is just for blueprints, you still need to gather the building resources, and spend an action to build your blueprints that are on your player board, but getting a good set and building an engine is part of what makes Fromage fun to come back to over and over again. In one game, I built an engine that generated free fruit, then rewarded me with bonus points for using those free fruits. In another, game, I ended up ignoring buildings all together and focused on total map supremacy.
Fromage feels unique, and it boasts lovely artwork from Pavel Zhovba. The pastel colours give it a fantasy storybook vibe that looks unique, and the screen printed tokens have wonderful looking accents. Both the lazy susan public board and the building tiles that go on your player board are dual layered, letting you slot in your pieces, which end up looking really sharp as it fills up. Some of the tokens look different, but are interchangeable, like the building tokens can be barns or silos. When you build a building, putting 4 of those tokens into the slot makes your player board pop. I really appreciate a theme that is widely beloved, as an appealing theme and approachable look is the perfect recipe for getting people to sit down at my table to play a game.
The downside of Fromage, is that those 4 wheel segments don’t change, and each one represents a fairly simple mini-game. Your actions in one wheel do not affect other wheels, everything is quite self-contained. While the worker placement and aging mechanism is clever and neat, I wish the stuff you are actually doing was a bit more interesting. Really what you’re looking at in a game of Fromage is trying to figure out which one of your 3 workers you’ll need for the segment you’re really trying to win hard on, and ensuring that you have the right workers at the right time.
Because of the simultaneous action, the game flows quickly and smoothly, you aren’t often waiting for the other players to finish their turns, nor do you really spend THAT much time planning moves for wedges that aren’t directly in front of you. You aren’t often going to complain that someone stole your spot right before you were going to go there, mostly because you don’t have the option to go there until that wedge slides in front of you. It’s great to engage with a midweight euro game that engages your problem-solving abilities so well, but also doesn’t take two whole hours to play.
Fromage is a beautiful, quick-playing euro game with unique mechanics that should appeal to those looking for a quicker game, without sacrificing strategic depth. However, its self-contained scoring segments and lack of interaction across the wheel might impact its long-term appeal. I’d happily come back to Fromage if friends wanted to play or if there were a new expansion to explore, but I don’t think it’ll be one that I’ll be pulling out when there isn’t a thematic reason to do so. That said, I do really like serving my friends cheese, and if I know they have game playing proclivities, Fromage is an obvious choice when hosting people outside my regular core gaming group.
