As a cheese lover, I'd been eying up Fromage for a while. It’s got gorgeous art, an excellent theme, and a solo mode (a big bonus for me). I finally caved a little while ago, and I'm happy to say it did not disappoint.
Tell me more!
Fromage is a simultaneous worker placement game where your goal is to become the best cheesemaker in France. The star of the show is the circular game board, which is made up of four sections that rotate between players at the end of each turn. Each quadrant is basically its own minigame, with a different way of making cheese (i.e. earning points). Each player plays in a single quadrant each turn, placing cheeses and covering them with a worker, and/or using a worker to gain resources. When the board rotates, your cheese ages one step, making it worth more money/points.
The rotating board isn’t just a gimmick, it’s also a neat way to show when you get your workers back. Each cheese-making spot on the board faces either right, forward, or left, and you take your workers back when they turn to face you, which means you’ll get them back in one, two, or three turns respectively (the board always rotates clockwise). And as you’d imagine, the longer it takes to get your worker back, the more points or resources you’ll get. All in all, it’s a very neat system.
Honestly the production value of the whole game is excellent. The cheese tokens are made of wood and fit into little cutouts in the board, so they don’t move when you spin it round. The workers have hollow plastic bases and sit over the cheese tokens, again making sure they don’t move around. The resource tokens (which I'll get to in a minute) have a few different designs, which is completely unnecessary gameplay-wise but adds some really nice variety. There are upgrade packs for wooden tokens too, plus a lazy susan for the board, although spinning the board around using the notches in the edge works just as well.
How complicated are the minigames?
Not complicated at all! It can feel overwhelming since there’s four of them, but you only play one at a time, so you can learn them as you go. Plus, each minigame sticks to the overarching logic of the more aged a cheese is (i.e. the more turns it takes to get your worker back), the more points it’s worth. This is shown on the board itself as bronze, silver, and gold cheeses, so if you’re ever in doubt of what to play, you can always fall back on this hierarchy.
Thematically, I really enjoy the four different minigames, or I should say venues: there’s the festival, where you’re trying to place your cheese to make a group (or groups) of adjacent market stalls; the fromagerie, where you want your cheese to be on as many different shelves as possible; the bistro, where you’re trying to pair your cheeses but also get them on as many plates as you can; and the villes, where you’re trying to stake your claim as the best cheesemonger in each region of France.
Fromage is very much a game of layers - once you’ve grasped each minigame, you might want to start worrying about planning ahead and making sure you’ve got enough workers for your next turn, or making sure you get a particular worker back in time for a particular minigame, or even strategically blocking your fellow players from earning points. It has that easy to learn, difficult to master vibe, as the more you play the more you’ll spot opportunities to maximise points.
What about those resources you mentioned earlier?
Another layer to Fromage is the resources: fruit, livestock, orders, and structures. Each player has their own board where they can use resources to unlock abilities, make extra cheeses, or make fruited cheeses (like cranberry Wensleydale, but French). That might sound like a lot of options, but resources are fairly limited, so it’s best to focus on just one or two to maximise your points. For example, you could save up your structure tokens to build one of the bigger structures, which then nets you a free resource when playing a particular minigame.
Normally you gain resources the same way you make cheese, by placing a worker on the board and getting a number of resources based on how many turns it takes for them to turn to face you. The type of resource you get is determined by the slice of the board that’s facing you, meaning that you only get a chance at a particular resource every four turns. By the way, you’re supposed to grab the resource(s) as soon as you place your worker, but be warned I (and the friends I played with) kept forgetting to pick them up until I got my worker back.
Anything else I should know?
There’s not a whole lot of player interaction in Fromage - it’s more of a solo puzzle with occasional opportunities to annoy your friends. On the other hand, since everyone plays simultaneously, there’s not much downtime between turns. It’s also very replayable - the four player boards are unique, so you can get a different experience just swapping your board, and if that wasn’t enough for you there’s a stack of structure tiles to completely replace the options on the boards. Plus the four board segments can go together in any order, and be mixed-and-matched with any of the minigames from the standalone sequel, Formaggio.
There’s also a very good solo mode where you play against an automated corporation; I won’t get into it too much here, but I've really enjoyed playing Fromage solo. The corporation plays slightly differently to a regular player, but they can still get in your way and you’re still trying to beat their score. There are increasing difficulties, too, which gives it great longevity.
Give me the overall verdict
Fromage is a neatly designed worker placement game that’s relatively quick to pick up but with strategic depths. It looks gorgeous and really leans into the cheesemaking theme (check out the cheese pairing suggestions in the back of the rulebook). It’s also super replayable and can be played anywhere from 1 to 4 players, with an excellent solo mode in the box. All in all, I highly recommend it.
