Rosalie Preview: Stop And Smell The Roses (I Couldn't Rose-ist)
Transcript
Hi everyone. I'm Tally, this is Farrell and we're Board of It and welcome to our preview of Rosalie, a one to four player heavy Euro from acclaimed Japanese publisher Uchibacoya. Now their previous heavy Euro, Sweetlands, was our top game of the year, so we were very excited to dive into this one.
And in this one, everyone plays rose gardeners and the goal of the game is to have the best rose garden in town and show it off and win all kinds of awards. Now you can need everything you have in your arsenal to do that because it's a lot of hard work and in particular you're going to need help from some friendly robot gardeners. So please note that what you will see is a prototype, so things are subject to change, but as is usually the case with Uchibacoya, it is a stunning prototype. So let's get into how to play.
Rosalie is played over seven rounds which alternate between spring and autumn. The first phase of each round is the action phase where players will take an action token and put it on an available action space on their clipboard and then of course take that action. Once done, they'll pass their clipboard to the player on their left, meaning that the available action spaces decrease each time. This goes on until all of the action tokens are used. When placing a token, players always have three options: to take the action shown, to copy a blocked action by paying an extra cost, or to pass, which allows a player to move up the pass track or to take bonuses from the pass track. Taking an action always requires you to spend a worker and the action can be taken a second time, but it costs more and requires a second worker. The actions include buying roses, moving up the automation tracks in order to unlock your robot helpers, building buildings to provide you with income, powers, and energy in order to power your robots, extending your garden so that you can hold more flowers and buildings, taking a contract, hiring more workers, and selling your fancy flowers in order to get money or VP. Generally, the goal is to plant roses, which at the end of the action phase produce flower tokens, with basic ones being spent to contracts or to produce hybrid fancy roses, whose tokens are used as previously described. However, the trick is that flowers often need care, with fancy roses requiring more care. If you
can't provide the required care points, then only do the flowers not provide flower tokens, but they will wilt, giving negative end game VP. This is where the robots come in, with small robots being placed on rose cards and big robots being placed in between roses, giving care points to both cards. You can also send your workers out and spend trials, a resource, to help out.
One key component of Rosely is debt, because at the start of the game, you're going to begin with a bunch of debt and money, because you've taken all these loans to be able to start your nursery. Now, debt is worth a lot of negative VP, so core part of the game is becoming profitable enough to pay it all off. Uh and also on top of that, if you ever can't take care of any of your flowers, they're going to die and they're going to be worth negative VP as well. So, you want to be careful of all of that. Then, you'll also be able to score VP in game and at the end of the game. So, in game, you can take VP as your income and you might get other income-related kind of scoring condition VP. You will be competing for objectives. Uh certain points in the game, the player that has the most of the thing that you're competing over will get VP.
And you can take the action that lets you sell your fancy flowers to get VP. Now, at the end of the game, you're going to score for fully completed contracts, for roses in your garden if you have special buildings adjacent to them, and you're going to score for uh sets of flowers, and also, you know, all your little bits that you have left over is going to be converted and you'll get a bit of VP that way. And at the end of the game, the player with the most VP will, of course, win. There's lots to like about Rosalee, and there's some things that will certainly put people off, which we'll get to later. But, to start with what is probably my favorite part of Rosalee, so it actually comes in the setup because, like their previous game Sweetlands, you have unique characters which have a special ongoing ability throughout the game, and they're kind of specked into certain elements of gameplay.
And what happens here is that you get a given seven cards at the start of the game, and you're going to pick four of them. And these cards will give you ongoing abilities or one-time bonuses or potentially end-game scoring. And you're going to pick four of them, and essentially, when you build these special unique buildings, uh you unlock that ability. And these will play with one kind of small section of the game, and it will give you an edge in that area, and then you obviously will play to your strength. And it's just a lot of fun because a lot of the variety of the game comes from these different characters. The cards themselves are always really difficult to choose between because they all have great bonuses, and it is just a really fun way, and my favorite part of the game, uh to to kind of play in these lines and and have your special little ability, and kind of make the most out of it, and then it gives you an incentive to want to play again because you want to try the other characters.
We also like the action system. All players pick an action and then reveal. But for the most part, players can actually take their actions simultaneously as there's only two where it matters about turn order. This in turn means that players always occupied and engaged, which is really nice compared to some other heavy Euros where you can often spend a lot of time waiting for your turn. On top of that, the fact that your options reduce throughout the round adds a level of spice to the proceedings as you sit there sweating about the smartest order to take your actions and weigh up what other players might do.
Another system we really enjoyed for being quite fun, but at the same time also quite horrid, was the whole debt system. Because what's going to happen throughout the game is a debt is going to then give you interest which then turns into more debt. And it becomes a really interesting decision of when you pay off some of that debt. So, are you going to pay it off to make sure you get less interest and don't continue the cycle? But then that's going to leave you with less money for actions, or are you actually going to lean into it, take on more debt to get more money to do kind of bigger actions and bigger turns uh in the hope that eventually you'll make enough to pay it all off. Because it's it's weirdly immersive in the fact that it's genuinely quite stressful having all this debt looming over you because it's worth so many negative points. It kind of puts you in the shoes of this small business owner struggling to stay afloat. In general, it hits all the right notes you'd want from a heavy Euro.
You're always debating the best option, figuring out the smartest way to navigate the round, weighing up if you should take a double action or it's just better at this point to save your money and workers for another time. The game does its best as well to make points of interaction between the players despite the simultaneous play. For example, needing certain flowers for the in-round objectives, and then they become more valuable and everyone fights over them. The competition for set objectives, kind of having a penalty and a positive depending where you rank, so there's a lot of competition there. And the fact that the market for fancy roses becomes less profitable the more a certain type of fancy rose is sold. Therefore, it's very important to fight uh for being first in turn order.
Then lastly, just the general fight over action selection and potential hate blocking of opponents when selecting actions.
In terms of drawbacks, the biggest one, I think for a lot of people, is going to be the fiddliness of Rosalee.
[snorts]
So, you have these seven rounds, and then they're first of all split into two separate types of rounds, so you have spring and you have autumn where you have different considerations. And then beyond that, kind of after the core round structure of all the phases, which is the same every round, you have all these additional elements with changes depending on the round number. So, then it it starts to make the game feel a bit unwieldy because aside from the action phase, uh which is more like a normal game, you then go out of that and you have all of these different phases and steps uh that that kind of breaks the flow. There's no flow to the game because it's has everyone done this? Has everyone done that? What do we need to do this round that's different than last round? And and you can't settle into a good rhythm. On top of that, there are also some systems in Rosalee that they they generate kind of nebulous floating around points. So, for example, the care points, they don't exist physically.
And one of the issues here is that robots, uh they're spatial, so you physically place them on your board, and then they're going to generate these care points, but workers and trawls, they give care points wherever you want them to go. So, [snorts] then it creates this weird juxtaposition of that. It's very important where you place your robots, but everything else doesn't matter, and then you might end up having one rose getting all of its care points from three different sources. And it becomes very tricky to to make sure you're doing it right and count back and work out because you can't just say, "Oh, I need 20 care points. Here are 20 care points." because of the robots. And it it just seems like something that should have been worked on a little bit more, tightened up to make it easier for the players cuz it gets quite a lot, especially at the end of the game when you have a lot of roses everywhere.
And to a lesser extent, this is also true of the electricity because you have windmills which generate kind of floating electricity, but you might also have physical electricity tokens. Uh and you might be energizing all different kinds of things. So, just something that that is a bit prickly, essentially. Final thoughts. In Res Arcana, there's lots to like, particularly if you're a fan of heavy Euros. I think it does a lot right, but then there are also elements that I think will put people off. It's not you could say as easy a recommendation as the previous game, Sweetlands. But I think in some sense, uh there are kind of pros and cons that different people might like it. For example, the game is more focused in some ways in that uh some heavy games kind of you could say the variety comes from they have all these different areas and you can't really dive into every area every game. Whereas here, you're going to be touching on everything every game. But it's really the uniqueness of the characters and your powers and the ability cards you choose that create the variety game to game. So, actually it it is more focused and easier to learn and approach and internalize in one sense because you're going to be very familiar with everything very quickly. And I think that's a bonus uh with obviously the kind of as already mentioned, the stop-startness of it being uh a con.
Yeah, exactly. I think for me that, like you said, would be a pro for some people. And it's not that I think it's a con necessarily, it's just I don't have that feeling necessarily at the end of the game that I want to go again.
Mhm.
Whereas I have that a lot with Sweetlands, and not to keep comparing it to that, but in some ways a little bit of a natural comparison. Because even with the first game I could already maybe foresee that you we would be doing the same things game to game.
Yeah.
And it's just about maximizing and doing the same things better by leaning into the different character powers. But it doesn't have that okay, set it up, let's go again feeling as I did with Sweetlands. But that said, it's obviously still really enjoyable game. I really like it. I would not ever turn down a game of it. Um but just one thing for me was that I find it in some areas very, very brutal. So it's kind of a maybe a bit weird juxtaposition that you the the sphere in which you can play around with is more narrow, and the some of the complexities or tightness is coming from like the economy with the the interest and the debt. So yeah, it's kind of I found it very hard to get over that hill of the debt element, and I was always in debt, and I could never quite get enough money to try and pay off the debt, and then I wasn't getting any points, and yeah, it's quite brutal despite looking very beautiful, and it's about making producing and growing flowers.
It's a real small business owner simulator.
Yeah, and there's just a couple of elements at some of the ends of the the autumn rounds, you get some scoring for being the person with could be the most buildings or the most roses from a a certain country. And the the reward and the punishment if you have the lowest is is quite swingy and can be quite harsh. So, that's something I found It's nice to be a dichotomy for me. It's both frustrating and oh my god, this is so harsh and so hard, but also it is something that I do want to try and get over and that part does make me want to play again because it's just so harsh.
Yeah, it's yeah, cuz you've said about it before and I think I don't know if it's more of an issue at two players because obviously one person is at least in this prototype, there's no rules that I've seen where uh you take it differently for two players. And the thing is that means that it's like a bigger swing because you might get 10 points and I might lose eight points and then obviously that's like a big swing cuz we're the only ones in the game, whereas maybe with more it's more spaced out. Um so yeah, I I I agree it can be quite harsh. I think you've been more on the receiving end sometimes.
Except for our first game actually, I think our first game I got loads of debt from not winning in them all.
Yeah, maybe. But no, I think for me to be fair, the more games we've played, the more I have got into it and maybe I'm starting to unlock a little bit of differences in the way that you could go about it. It's just that it's not that broad.
Yeah.
Um but I'm was really enjoying actually, especially in our last game, exploring leaning into the character powers that I had last time. And I do really like that you can choose the four powers that you unlock because that also is giving a bit of variability even if you go with the same character next time.
Yeah.
Um so you can kind of build that up. I think that's a really nice touch actually considering that's the point where there is the most
Yeah.
variability. So then within that, you can go like even more.
Yeah, I think like I said, it's it's been my favorite part like picking the character and picking the ability and the way that that affects your play through. So, that is where the variety comes from in this game and that is kind of you could say the incentive to keep playing throughout the different characters. So, really like that. Uh yeah. So, that's our review of Elysium. Uh we liked a lot of things about it. There were some things that were a bit unsmooth to us. But, all in all, a really terrific game from Uchu Pokoya. So, if you have any questions about the game, please ask us. Please remember that this is a prototype, so things might change in terms of the rules or components, although Uchu Pokoya generally sends a pretty finalized prototype when we get it from them.
And just thank you for watching and we hope to see you again. Bye.
Bye.