Rosalie Review - Don't Let The Cuteness Fool You...There's Thorns Amongst the Roses
Transcript
Hey, I'm Alex Rackle from Board Gameco and today I'm reviewing Rosalie from Uchuboya. Rosalie is a one to four player game in which players are going to be planting various flowers, watching them bloom, tending to their board, managing to tableau, hiring more gardeners and robots. There's a lot going on here and do not let the cutesy artwork fool you. This is very much a heavyweight game similar to their last scand. Before we dive into it, this is a prototype all rules and components of exchange and I'll have a link to the crowdfunding campaign down below. Also, this channel is sponsored by All Play. More about them at the end of the video. In Rosalie, players across seven rounds of play are going to be managing their their gardens. You're planting a variety of roses in order to go ahead and sell them to the highest biders over here to the biders to the buyers, I should say, managing various contracts, fulfilling those, all while attempting to make sure your flowers aren't withering, building up your tableau, and trying to get as many upgrades as possible in a variety of different upgrade paths. Also, you take actions through this fun little drafting board where you'll be taking an action and then drafting the board to the players. Uh, which kind of has an interesting little twist to a general Euro game. Now, there's a lot to go into over here. There's this is not going to be a rules teach by any means, but I will go over the general cycle of play so you have an understanding of what's going on here before diving into my thoughts and opinions. Across seven rounds, alternating various seasons of spring and autumn, you're going to go through a sequence of different actions each round. The first starting sequence is going to be taking actions. that's going to be the core of the game and all the things you're doing to actually improve your tableau. It also has a fun little element of you're going to be paying money to take actions, but also utilizing gardeners to take more
actions. So, you have a little puzzle as far as what you're trying to do and how to manage your resources, as well as which actions to take and what other players are going to be taking their actions and how that's going to translate into you being able to do your little puzzle. The action phase is going to be the core thing you do every single round as you try to figure out the action drafting puzzle. From there, you're going to go into the care phase where you're going to spend your robots. You have big and small robots, and you will be upgrading these tracks as you play, your gardeners, as well as shovels to prepare to uh go ahead and uh take care of various flowers or alternatively watching them wither and die. When you're done with the care phase, you're going to move to the blooming and contract fulfillment. That's where all the various flowers you have, by the way, you can have a lot more boards. You'll be adding your tier up below as you play. But you're going to take the flowers you have are going to bloom, those that didn't, you know, wither and die. And this is season dependent. Some flowers will be blooming in spring and autumn like you can see over here.
Others will be blooming just in spring unless you go ahead and have them in a greenhouse in autumn. So you're going to go through a blooming phase before you go ahead and deal with contract fulfillment where you're going to have a starting contract. But players can get more contracts over here. And you're going to attempt to fulfill those contracts before moving them down in your display. When you're done with that, you're going to move to the flower show phase, which is where you can sell your flowers to the various buyers before moving into a growth phase. That's where your various seedlings. is you're going to have uh plants when you gather flowers, they can go straight onto your board or they can come into play as seedlings and your seedlings are going to grow into actual flowers or level two seedlings into level one seedlings before moving into the income phase and finally general maintenance phase. Although I should also note the income phase also comes with paying for your gardeners. So, it's a kind of a pro and kind of phase. All the good things are fun to get. All the wages are a little less fun to pay out. You're going to be doing that across the seven rounds of play, ultimately trying to build up the best garden while managing everything. And by everything, again, this is not a rules overview. By managing everything, I mean the various upgrades, the various robots, moving up your robot track tracks, trying to get more gardeners, trying to get more buildings into play, placing those buildings into various locations around where it's going to most help your crops, and even like I said already, getting these various building boards.
Also, there's fun other things. Again, not a rules of view. There's other things like asymmetric characters. This entire playerboard kind of pulls out. I can't really show you, but you're going to have these player boards. You can tuck in a variety of asymmetric characters that are going to give you both their own characters as well as their sets of cards that are going to change the way each character interacts with the various elements of the game. Basically, it's a heavy euro in which you're going to be managing your gardens, trying to make sure you have enough resources. Oh, and debt. I didn't even talk about debt yet. There's so much debt. You start the game with debt. That's how you get all your starting money. And you can acquire debt as you need to go ahead and get more money, but you have to deal with the interest that can turn into more debt. So, there's a lot of things going on here as you attempt to manage a business. You're managing a business. It just happens to be a very pretty flower blooming business, but that doesn't mean it's not hard. Running a real flower shop is hard, and so is managing your game in Rosalie. That's a very general overview.
You can check out a variety of videos out there for full rules features if you want that. This is definitely on the heavier side, which is why I'm leaning more into the general arc of what's going on here. But with that, let's dive into my review, what I like, don't like, and can see others not liking in Rosalie. And I'll start with the first thing I like because it is the thing that I think makes Rosalie stand out. There's a lot of Euro games out there. There's a lot of heavy euros. Lots of ways that the the recipe and ingredient that makes a good Euro game all come together. And sometimes a good game is just how it particularly combined those ingredients. But also sometimes it's about what did you bring to the table that's new and interesting. And drafting as a general concept isn't new and interesting. I mean I I do love drafting. It's one of my favorite mechanics. And Rosley introduces that with kind of action drafting. You'll be taking this little action board and putting your little check marks on these various zones. There are ways to page take actions that are kind of blocked.
So you're never fully stuck, which is nice, but you are trying to think through a puzzle of which action do you need to take and what actions are others taking as these boards get passed around. So that's already something new. I don't think it completely makes the game by any means, but it is nice and worth calling out something that is done differently. Again, action drafting, I'm sure games have done it. Component drafting, left, right, and center. You see it in all games, whether it's cards, tokens, components are drafted all the time. Action drafting as a mechanic is not something I've seen in a lot of games. I'm sure it exists. I'm sure I've played one and I'm forgetting it, but it's certainly uh relatively rare, if done at all. And Rosley did a good job with the general action drafting board. Past that, the tableau building is going to be the other thing to call out. There's a ton of ways to upgrade in this game, although you are working with limited resources. This is a euro after all, although it does last for seven rounds, which is a pro that comes with a con. I will say something I talk about whenever I'm covering euros is very often I feel a little too tight in how much you can get done in a short four round game. Especially because you're managing a tableau. You're trying to get the ongoing benefits, but you're like, "Oh, this is a four round game.
Everything I get in round one is great. Round two is already like we're already losing half the benefit. By the time you get to round three, like most of the benefit of a tableau that you're building is gone. Now you're working on the endame." I always feel that four rounds for a euro and sometimes they do it in three rounds can feel way too tight when you're trying to work on building up your tableau. I don't mind three or four rounds when there's not tableau building, but tableau building just those two don't think things those two things don't go as well together for me. But Rosley gives you seven rounds of play, which again comes with a con, which I'll come to later. But seven full rounds of play, giving you a lot of time to watch your flowers bloom, to go ahead and choose to make those decisions around whether you put something in as a seedling or whether it goes ahead directly as a flower to manage which resources to get to build up your robot tracks. There's a lot of tableau building those care phases when you go ahead and have your robots caring for flowers or when you upgrade those tracks allow them to care for even more flowers based on the intersection between those cards. There's a ton of ways also these buildings over here as well as the unique cards you have and the the slots.
There's a ton of ways that you can go ahead and build up your tableau in this game and you have to choose which which pathway most works for you as well as being mindful of how the action drafting itself limits those choices. So, it's not just about the the strategic pathways you want to build. It's also about what you're even practically able to do or whether it's worth paying increased costs to get that thing done. And it does all this while being very charming. This is something Rosley does something that that Uchi Pakoya did very well with Sweetlands where they took a game made it very charming and appealing while still maintaining that heavyweight feel allowing players who want something with this charm and feel and the components and all that. The components are top-notch. Like these little This is a prototype. I should be very clear with that. Prototype Will's components has to change. But some of these components are incredibly well done, even for a prototype. And I hope they can maintain that for the final production. There's a lot of charm to the art, the theme, and the components that are on your table.
Now, there are some things I don't like in the game, and the first is going to feed off of what I said already about the length of the game. I like how much you can get done in a seven round game of Rosalie, but the flip side is it is on the longer side. When I think of what game I'm going to table at any given point, once you try to cross that 3-hour mark, it is a little and again, every player is different. If you don't mind 3 to four hour Euro games on a regular basis, that's great. this will work for you. For me, this definitely is like the box says two two to three hours, 120 to 180 minutes. Uh, and maybe that will get closer to that as I play it more, but so far, I'd say it's closer to the 3 to four hour range, although that is dependent on player count. The tricky part, two players is going to be the fastest game, but I think it benefits the least. The downside of having action drafting, there's a few other interactive elements as far as things you're fighting over, but the action drafting, I think, is less satisfying as a two-player game, which means I think this game is best at three. you have the more more of the interactivity from the drafting, but you have less of the downtime that a fourth player adds. And again, a fourth player can definitely be on the longer side. Even three players can drift to the longer side. So, that's one thing that the seven rounds is nice.
The downside of having that arc does mean you are signing up for a longer game experience. And then similarly, the components, the components, there's a lot on the table. I kind of have them all piled out over here. There's a ton of point piles, money piles, p the the various flower types, the various resources. There's a ton of things going on here that are going to just be a lot of table management. It's one of those games that gives you a good payoff. There's a lot of satisfaction in the engine you're building and the tableau that you're building. Uh, but it does so at the cost of a longer game and a lot of components to manage. This is a game that I think it needs a good insert. And again, I am dealing with a prototype. I don't know what the final game will have, but if the final game does not have a good insert, you're going to want to look into 3D printed inserts to make this that much easier. from the individual player components to the just tons of stacks of things. Dealing with a lot of paper bags is not how I plastic bags. Dealing with a lot of plastic bags, I mean paper bags are great, too, is just not how I'd recommend dealing with the setup of this. I also don't like the uh feel bad competition moments. Uh in the game, you're going to have various competitions that are happening and it's going to uh give rewards to players, but also penalize players and some of those penalties include debt. And the debt is already its own puzzle to manage. uh having extra degrees of feel bad moments whether points, debt, whatever in the game. I don't know if that adds to the experience for me. Let me rephrase that.
I know it does not add for the add to the experience. You can have the competition purely by giving people the good things, but then the worst performing player also getting an a downside. I don't I didn't love that overall. I think it's just it felt like a weird out ofplace decision in a game that's otherwise about how can I do the fun stuff and it's like by the way, you just got slapped in the face with the bad thing uh while you're at it. Granted, there's also wages, so you have to be mindful of that. There's also withering flowers. So, I guess if you're not managing your your your game right, there are other bad things. This one felt more out of place than those. As far as I can see others not liking, debt is going to be the biggest thing. This game relies heavily around the central mechanic of debt. If you're not familiar with games like Brass or honestly any game that gives you debt as a concept, although in this game, you start off with debt, which makes it worse. So, you are managing your debt from the very get-go. That's kind of again going to those feelings you have in games. While economy is always something going going to have to manage, as soon as you're dealing with negative economy, there's that interesting puzzle as far as do you feel the pressure, the time crunch, or does it just feel like a challenge you have to master? If you don't like debt in board games, you Rosalie over here doesn't really give you a choice as to whether you're dealing with debt, you are dealing with debt. The only choice is how much you're dealing with. As far as final thoughts on Rosalie, this is a very charming game. It's a very charming game with an excellent theme and it delivers on the mechanics as well. I've never actually played Sweetlands. heard nothing but good things about it. And if anything, this makes me want to play Sweetlands more because they did a great job of giving a heavyweight game that is relatively accessible. Again, the rules are not my biggest complaint. The rules, I think the the length and the components are definitely on the heavier side. The rules are actually relatively
straightforward. There's a good sequence of what you're walking through. It's relatively easy to teach, to understand. There's just a lot. It does have that initial information overload, but the general concept of you you plant a flower, you harvest the good things, and the flower needs maintenance, but also your workers need maintenance. That's pretty easy explaining all the various upgrades and even the robots over there. The robots feel like an interesting choice over here thematically. I love it mechaners in your game taking care of your flowers. It just feels a drop out of place, but in a good way. But overall, this gives you a tight uh strong economic engine, a very rewarding tableau to build up just at the downside of the uh of of the game length and the components. Overall, I'm going to come in at a four out of five. If you're looking for other game recommendations, like I said already, I haven't played it, but based on everything I know about the games, I definitely recommend checking out Sweetlands if you uh haven't yet. If you're interested in Rosley, check out Sweetlands and vice versa. And then also, in a slightly weird way, this gives me vibes of a Gricola. Like, it definitely has that arc of building up both the tableau, watching things get better, watching things develop while also dealing with uh resources, management, wages, all those other fun, less fun things that come along with managing a farm. just in this case, it's not really a farm so much as a bunch of flowers, but it's all the same general concept overall. And I mentioned at the beginning of the video that Allplay is a channel sponsor. If you go to allplay.com, you can find a variety of games. And if you're looking for other heavy euro games, you can check out Galactic Cruise from one of their partner publishers. And if you're in the US, you can get anything from both All Play and any of their partner publishers for $4 flat rate shipping. In any case, until next time, I'm Alex Radcliff from Board Game Co. Hope you found this video helpful, and as always, I hope you have a good one.