Fromage Review

[Music] hey everybody Welcome to drive-through review 794 today we're going to take a look at frage uh this is a new game that come out recently and uh plays one to four players it is a simultaneous action selection game so players will be taking their turns kind of at the same time and then I'll go down and show you but here I'll show you on the back here uh there you can see that circular board there in the middle of the box and you're rotating the board so I have a little quadrant or wedge in front of me take my actions and then we're going to rotate the board and the one that was in front of you is now in front of me the one that was in front of me is now in front of Billy and so on and you're going to be uh making and aging cheese and getting resources to do very specific types of cheese and build structures and use like the dairy and that kind of thing uh it plays one to four players and it has really cool solo mode which I'll show you and uh let's just go down to the table and uh show you a little bit about how it works very unique game and I'll come back and tell you what I think okay here I've got the game set up and you can see that that board that I was talking about with the four different quadrants or wedges now these are puzzle pieces so I'm not going to mess up my board right now but you can actually take these out you can see a little bit there right um and then you know arrange them in random different orders and then there's also this piece here and this is for Gathering different types of resources so you can get uh pieces to build structures different types of fruit uh cows or livestock and then these are kind of like order cards or consider them like contract card so you can sort of arrange this in a little bit of a randomized fashion so you know this quadrant isn't always next to that quadrant and so on and what players will be doing is they will be taking their workers they have three types of workers so let's say I'm the blue player here so I've got my yellow cheese there and then I've got my blue cheese and then I have my white cheese so each player has the three different cheeses you can see over here we've got the the red player there with their three different types of cheeses and on your turn you're going to place these workers out so if we zoom in here this is kind of like the end of a solo game I just played the other night and we'll take some of these off of here and so I have different cheese markers in my color in this case I'm the blue player you can see those little red or orange ones out there I guess that's more orange than red and so if I want to make let's say this white cheese or this yellow cheese I'm going to put this out there when I do that I'm going to put a little marker there now you can see the the orientation of which way this character is pointing is going to tell us how long it takes to age that particular cheese okay and if we zoom out here you can see there's four different mini games so as the board rotates I'll do my actions here this will rotate now you can see this is now going to be facing away from me but as soon as it rotates where it's going to be pointed back to me then I will get that worker back so I'm going to lose this worker for three turns whereas if I did this one here you can see this yellow spot there in that case I would need my yellow worker so I'll put him out here or her and I'll put that here so immediately right on my next turn as this rotates away from me here she's going to be facing back to me so I'll get her right back on my immediate next turn and so what you're trying to do here is pick and choose in a sense which of these mini games you're going to try to do the best at because you're not going to be able to do the best at all four and then in the process of that you're going to score varying difference amounts of points in each of these areas as well as take into consideration what's kind of going on in your player board so let's take a quick look at your player board you basically have four types of resources here you've got structures and you can gather these structure tokens here which you just store off to the side so if I wanted to Mark the kitchen is being built at any time in my turn I can take and move these over and then now I've constructed the kitchen now you can also see some of these are tiles so after probably your first game there's a whole giant stack of these different tiles that you can draft and then choose to sort of overlay any of the pre-printed uh little structures on there so in this one this case I did the annex so you can build these at any point during your turn if you've got the structures to it and these are just different special abilities and these are really the heart of what will keep the game replayable so that you got that here then you also have here livestock which you can gather and then any point you can pay zoom in a little bit there this amount so I could pay two livestock and then on my turn on whichever wedge like for example here this is currently facing me I could then build one particular type of cheese so a blue cheese sort of facing that direction and you can do that without a worker or if I spent three here I could spend and then build a yellow cheese and you can see the direction is also has to do with kind of of the length of Aging cuz there's always a little background here so we've got a bronze background a silver background and a gold background So in theory the longer the cheese ages the better it is so this is kind of a gold star Silver Star bronze star and but it's going to take longer so this worker you could see if I was placing a worker in this case I get it back but in this case you can do it if you use the dairy without spending a worker you can just have collected these livestocks over the course of the turn and so possibly double up on putting two cheeses out um on a single turn because to keep in mind here the game will end immediately as soon as someone runs out of their cheese tokens once that round happens happens at at that round then that will be the end of the game and remember as I said in the beginning all the players will be doing this simultaneously so you always well not always sometimes you can skip this but you always be putting a worker out here on the wedge and then possibly putting one up here to collect resources as well which I'll show you in a minute so every turn basically somebody is going to be getting rid of at least one cheese more than likely but you got to watch out for people using um this Dairy section to put out different cheeses and this one cost five livestock but you can basically put out any cheese that you want there in that case so that's that section down here we have the fruit which I'll skip over for now and then finally we have these like order cards contract cards and so anytime on your turn that you build a specific cheese so for example this one would go nicely with that one if I built a silver aged uh yellow cheese then I can take and move that over from the left hand side of my board over here and put that in my score pile and you can see you're going to score points down here um at the end of the game based on how many of these order cards you fulfilled so that's another thing to watch out for now the last thing to talk about here are these two types of fruits so if I scrs down here you can see as you collect these fruits during the game they're kind of like a generic fruit but depending on the type of cheese that you build you may need to move one of these over there to be either a fruited cheese or with a jam and that's going to be dependent on what you're trying to do so you to build one of these types of cheeses you need to have one over here in the available part and then you're going to look on the board so let's take an example so here's an example of a frued cheese of course it needs to be white so I put that out there but to be able to put my little worker here I would need an available fruit to score so i' would put that out like so that's a build that I need an available fruit here and then move it over here to the fruit spot and then this will score now to build a jam then I'll need to place a worker out here in case of blue one and then I would move that over to the jam space and now instead of putting it here in the fruited cheese I put over in the jam the way that these scores you multiply the number of fruited cheeses by the jam so in this case 2 * 3 would be six and so I get that point so you kind of want to do at least two in one of these and then maybe a bunch in the others uh cuz if you just had one it would just be three points that right in there doubles the amount of points or if you had zero in here obviously this would give you zero points so you want to kind of balance that out get you some bonus points there and it is worth noting while we're looking at the board here that any kind of leftover resources that you have over here for every five of those you get an additional point at the end of the game and some of these um structures can also be endgame points I chose to cover up that particular one and this case but uh that's possible now the bulkier points are going to come from scoring these different wedges out here also from scoring uh a good amount of contracts if you choose to go that route as well now this one is kind of like a little area majority game in here so we'll just put some cheeses out here for fun and what you're going to do is these little markers are going to be put out here randomly on these little spots um and these are going to tell you how much these different areas are worth because if we look down here you can see at the bottom areas with this token are worth three points these are worth four and five so if we look at an example here let's take a look at this area right here so this one in this case is a fivepoint token now the blue player has actually two little wedges in here because this one straddles both of these areas and this one is in this so they've got two to the one here from the orange one which straddles all three of those zones so you're going to evaluate all those different zones uh if there's a tie then everybody's just going to score three points for that then you're just going to total up those points there now the one thing I kind of glossed over here is when you go to do the resources you can put this one of your workers here and this will give you the amount of that resource so in this case I'll get three cards or two cards or one card and whenever you do the one obviously you're going to get the worker right back whereas if you do the three option on this resource Gathering it's going to take you three turns uh to get it back now the next wedge here is kind of interesting it's sort of like building a bunch of orthagonal kind of like longest road type type of things uh and some of these are pre-printed and can be used by any player so if we take a look here the blue player's got 1 2 3 four five they'll take a look over here at the scoring five gets you nine points and the orange one doesn't really have any they got a one two and then a one which isn't going to score them anything so they get just a two points for that so you're trying to build um at least probably just one long contiguous uh road so to speak through here to score points um but you can do multiple as well and then in this one this particular case is where you get the structures the next wedge here is also interesting like so this one's sort of tricky it's actually trickier to explain I think than to play um but you see these different table settings here and what you want to do is have at least one table setting if you can help it where you have both of your wedges of your color and so for each table that you have sort of dominated we'll look over here the wedges are going to score different amount of points so if you don't have any table settings where both of yours are in play than any of yours that are on a bronze plate we're going see the different colored plates here they're going to score zero points so worthless even if you don't don't have a setting even silver and gold will be worth some points but you can see in this particular one the the blue player hairs at three different settings so the bronze silver and gold plates are going to be worth more so if we go down here so if you got at least three bronzes are worth three six and then nine for gold finally we have this kind of like storefront the fromagerie and when you place a wedge here you can you get a instant kind of ability uh with the left- hand side one so if I put a wedge here I get two different resources so I can get like a cow and a berry or something or structure in a card if I go here I get this one resource if I go here I can discard a resource to get any other resource and if I put tokens right here I get three two or one points at the end of the game for each token but to score points at the end of the game with this little multiplier here you want to be on different shelves so for if you're on all six shelves you'll get 20 points at the end of the game so sometimes it might be a ho you in the middle of the game to you know you have a particular action that you want to take cuz maybe you need particular resources you know badly or maybe you just want to be in a different place than you've already been so you can kind of um add into that logarithmic multiplier thing there so like I said each player is just going to play until one player is out of their little cheese wedges and then you're going to total up all the scores from the wedges maybe from any of your specialty buildings your contracts and so on and that's kind of the gist of the game okay that was a fromage let's just jump into my three pillars of review uh what's Play Time say this says 40 minutes that sounds is about right um I think because of the simultaneous play it's not really going to take uh too much different amount of time with one to four players sometimes you can get a turn where somebody's kind of thinking about things for a little bit but that's not going to be every turn because sometimes you know the options that are ideal usually present yourself present themselves pretty immediately especially once you get to know the game um but also what workers you have available to you can also limit what you can do because if you've spent some of the workers that you know age two or three turns and you've you've got one worker or maybe even zero workers in front of you then you know your options are going to be limited for that turn so your turn is going to go quick and it's going to kind of all shake out evenly over the course of the game um I have played this at all player counts and it's a tough question about which one I like more cuz I really like every single player account and that includes the solo mode um if you had to pin me down I'd say four players just because I like the I don't know the level of interaction because there's there is interaction for sure because there's an interesting part of that because you know all the turns are simultaneous and I'm looking at kind of what I'm doing here but I'm also still trying to think of well if I use this worker I'm either going to get it back next turn or in a couple of turns and I want to look at the wedge to my right that's I'm going to be getting because I think well if I use this blue worker to get a resource and this white worker to you know uh do my cheese action you know put the cheese out on the board and I have this gold one left is there going to be something I can do you know coming down the pipe and if the other players still like taking their turn you could kind of like look and see do they have their yellow worker even are they going to take over a yellow spot and my groups discussed this happening where you like oh what you can get kind of like a a do like a reverse domino effect where everybody's kind of stuck watching the others but actually has never happened in a game like it's never come up I think that was kind of an initial like instinct that people had where it was going to be like oh well you've got to be you know be able to block it off so nobody can see but that's actually never been a problem not even one time um and I think it could be a problem in a four player game not in a two-player game because it's just you're on opposite sides and you know it's too many turns ahead to be worried about but honestly I've never seen it in a four player game where it's a problem but I like four players the most because there a little bit more interesting because not only can you maybe block out the main cheese action spot but the resource spot because if somebody takes that three you know to draw three cars or get three berries they're not getting it back until three turns later but that means that three spot is blocked for the other players as well so there's kind of an interesting Dynamic there when it comes back to me and I was like oh I'd really like to draw three cards cuz I've scored all my you know contract cards well it's blocked sometimes the two and the three is blocked because if you're playing with four players there's chance you know lots of people want to get those contract cards because they're good um so that's an interesting Dynamic there um so it's a little bit more crowded right with the four player but not to this extent where it's gamebreaking I think it I think that makes it slightly more interesting at that level U now there are I didn't show you at the wedges there's these little like sleeves or I don't know inserts that you can slide in and out and they're double-sided to kind of mix up and change up the spots so it's not always like you know the map one where there like the area control it's not always like the same color cheeses in the same location so you got to make sure you can't like really memorize got to make sure I have that you know age3 blue cheese with a berry kind I can get that really sweet spot um because you can mix those up and those vary by player count too um I didn't point it out but you might have noticed during the walkth through that some of those were just blocked out and nobody could go to them so it kind of you know simulates crowdedness when you're playing with like you know one or two players in that way uh so it scales very well there but I you know like I said every player count plays amazing I think U but if you had to ask me four would be my um preference but again the um solo is really good too I really enjoyed the solo um it has a really nice scaling thing and the way that it works is it it kind it kind of pulls cheese off of like a little dummy board here and just fills in spots based on the card flip of the contract cards it'll just eat up a spot it always goes first so it's always blocking you and then as you kind of level up there's four levels it will like activate little special abilities so you can kind of work your way up um to playing through those and that's a really fun way and I think it's a really good like instructional way too to help you kind of you know develop your game and your strategy and that kind of thing so that's really cool um now my last pillar is usually what is this game like I don't know I don't really know what games it's kind of like a lot of games because the mini games are just kind of like kind of like loose area control set collection types of things um but that doesn't really do it any kind of Justice at all it really doesn't the whole sort of and I'll use gimmick in like the most positive term because I think it's a fantastic gimmick the whole like aging work work placement thing is really really really neat and how you have the different types of workers and the way everything just it just everything is like so woven together nicely in such a good package and the minute those words come out of my mouth I feel like it's such crappy reviewer speak but in this case it's like I don't think I've seen a game that is this tightly woven it's hard to explain because unless you've played it because there's a lot of games that are very tightly woven there's a lot of great games that are tightly woven but this kind of wears its its tightness its tightly woven on its sleeve because everything is just so in tune and maybe it has something to do with the whole mechanism of like turning the clock or winding this thing around um but it all really speaks speaks to that and there's nice sort of tactical visual sense when you know you put a worker down and you're waiting for it to come back and I think that's that's one of the pieces that keeps you sort of distracted enough that you won't like technically like cheat and like look at what other people are doing before you do what you're going to do because you're always kind of watching and like okay when am I getting my white cheese or my blue cheese worker back that's way more important than what anybody else is doing um you know you want to be smart about where you're placing things so the interaction this is the other part that's what's weird is the interaction is sort of like it's direct but it's done in an indirect way because when I'm like putting pieces on the area map of France or the one where you want to build the orthagonal lines I'm looking at that and I'm going what's the smartest play here based on the workers that I have and also what I can hope to make further connections on in the future and so you have to really try to figure out what's the best spot that's going to give me the most options later but then you're also making a decision a larger decision sort of higher up the chain of like which one of these wedges do I really want to go after because you cannot do well at all of them because you can score a whole ton of points in some of these wedges like you can get 40 points out of a wedge and then meanwhile you might get six out of another but the other player one of the other players might get 40 points out of that wedge and he might get you know 10 out of this other one or something so trying to figure out the best most efficient use of your workers and where you're kind of going with the cheese whether you're going to the market you're going you know traveling around the country you're going to this fancy beastro and you're like trying to set the table um somehow this is all thematic um that's a really fun kind of balancing act and that whole thing is really cool and I would say if you didn't have the drafting of the tiles that would probably get you even as it stands like a good six seven plays out of it then after a while it would get old but they added in the drafting of the structure tiles and that is where the game really just to me takes off I think this is I think this is one of these all-timers to me I I don't know I'm really blown away by this game I I recently did a podcast where I talked about my end of the year best of list which I'm not doing right now because I Haven really been playing a whole ton of games the last couple of months of the year and right now I had J of Robin Hood at the top but I'll just say this now this is the one I think would compete for for top and I noticed the other day Marco arnado uh a video reviewer who's been doing it even longer than I have uh he put at the top of his list and uh you know he's traditionally I know his tastes have kind of changed over the years but he's he's traditionally like a War gamer like an old you know World War II whatever you know traditional war game type of guy um and this was the top of his list and I'm like yeah see that's how good this game is um and I saw on the top you know near the top of some other lists as well U but to me again circling back the structures that you can draft that gives you like a Dominion esque vibe to where you're like oh okay I've got this little combo now I'm going to set up try to set up a little engine with these struct es and build them and run try to run that and you know try to build my play around those structures that I've drafted it's very interesting because most of the time you you end up with four structures because you you draw four take one pass it you know take the next one pass and you end up with something that you you want and then you have to make a decision at the beginning of the game to Overlay the existing structures printed on your board and so you're like okay I'm going to get these done but you're not going to build all four structures I don't think um I don't recall a game where somebody has built all four but you're going to want to pick you know probably two of them at least that you can run and then get something out of them and then kind of build your strategy around that as well so the thing is is it's such a simple game it's like I'm going to put this worker down I need that color I'm going to get him back right away I'm going to get him back in the next turn or the turn after that and that's it that's all there is to it it's just getting your cheese out um but then there's these other very simple layers that you can kind of add on to it um and the kind of icing on the cake is that drafting of those tiles where you you just every game you played it's going to be a little bit different it's going to make you focus on like different aspects whether it's the fruit stuff or the the dairy stuff or you know um uh getting the cards or bonuses to getting resources that kind of stuff so or bonuses to get your structures out or maybe there's a really nice building that scores you extra points that kind of stuff um so this is really really a lot kind of going on but it's such an easy game and it's so easy to teach and it plays so quick and stuff and snappy enough that the learning of the game like there's not a lot of upfront learning it's all kind of on the back end of it it cuz like I said you're just putting cheese you're just trying to get all your cheese out right that's your first goal as a new player but then when you're on your six seventh or eighth play you're like ah I got this engine I got the tiles and these are the ones I drafted I'm trying to burn this out you know and um get all that stuff so it's it's cool because a lot of games recently are front loed where you're trying to like ingest this whole ecosystem and language and all this stuff right up front before you even sit down to make your first turn ever but this one you can do your first turn and you can play your first game and your second game and your third game and your fourth game and all of it is pushed on the back and then you by the end of you know whatever that road is you're going to have you're going to have like fulfilled this like accomplishment of growth with the game and something about like the Turning of that in the mini games and all that stuff just it all adds together anyway I recommend this way beyond anything I've recommended in in a long time and uh really this is like you know I don't know whatever you know if people want to like hold me my feet to the fire for this but everybody should have this game everybody every single person that's it [Music] [Music]