Fromage: Formaggio

Sweet Dreams are made of Cheese…

2024 brought us the world of cheese on a wonderfully charming cheese board. Designed by Matthew O’Malley and Ben Rosset, Fromage is a worker placement, cheese-making game played simultaneously in four quarters of a central circular board. The interesting gimmick, however, was the central board then spun, in lazy Susan fashion, offering each player four mini games in which to make their cheese.

Each quarter offered a different puzzle to crack but what made this game shine was that when you placed your cheese wedge shaped workers, they would only come back to you when they were facing you. The better actions demanded more turns of the board for them to return, whereas simpler actions got them back quicker. This was a really interesting spin to the genre and thematically, any excuse to pair a game with cheese and wine is welcome (thank you Viticulture for your service!).

Following its huge success comes its stand alone but totally compatible sequel. Formaggio does the exact same thing but offers four new mini games that can be played on their own or mixed with the originals for lots and lots of replayability.

Say Cheese and Smile!

Each player has their own personal player board which has a slight asynchronous element. Across the top are a series of buildings which, if built, will offer ongoing bonuses. To build, simply use a free action to play building tokens (gained from the central board) and place them on any of the sections on your board. Once unlocked the building tokens can’t be moved. This section offers things such as bonuses when visiting certain areas on the board, or extra spaces to send workers. The buildings are a really important element and shouldn't be ignored however like much of the game it’s about choosing how far to focus on each area without forcing yourself down too narrow a strategy.

Also on your board you have cow sheds. Here you can send animal tokens (also gained from the central board) in order to make bonus cheese. And who doesn’t love bonus cheese!? Then there are your fruits. When you make cheese on the central board that has a fruit symbol on it, you can move fruit tokens from your basket to either the fruity cheese table or the Jams. At the end of the game you will get points to the value of your fruity cheese multiplied by the number of jams you have made. The final personal resource you need to manage are contracts.

For each contract card you complete (make a matching cheese) you will score points valued to the amount of cards you have completed at the end. Resources are tight and hard to get without losing your workers for a number of turns and so managing what you upgrade and how to spend them is a great puzzle in itself. However, the central board is where all the real fun happens.

Get to the Gouda Stuff…

Like Fromage, the central board is made of four quarters, however in Formaggio they each have a season attached to them. Throughout the game there may be bonuses achieved in different seasons. It doesn’t make a huge impact to the game play but every now and then you might save that worker to use in spring in order to get that free cow rather than spend it in Autumn for a quick return.

The other new edition is platinum level cheese. There are your usual bronze, silver and gold which will take one, two or three turns to get back to you but now platinum cheese will offer big rewards but take a whole four rounds to get back to you.

The first section is Banca. Based on a real bank in Italy where you can deposit cheese as collateral for loans. You will need to store your cheese in columns and or rows in order to score. For example four cheese in a column will get a whopping eighteen points where as having two in a row can build to between two and ten points.

The next is Regioni which shows a map or northern Italy and will score for the amount of different regions you have multiplied by the number of flags above the cities you occupy. This is a nice spin on the simple area control of Fromage without adding any extra complexity.

Vigneto is wine pairing, when you make a cheese here you get to take a wine token from above it and line it up with any others you have. These tokens offer bonus resources but more importantly at the end you will score points for however many complete bottles of wine you have in your line of tokens. This is a really nice way to get bonus resources throughout the game but can pay off big time if you invest in the high level cheeses.