Rosalie | 5 Reasons We LOVE This Game | Kickstarter Board Game Preview
Transcript
You don't have any generational wealth. You're on your own.
You just All your money you have is from the bank. You have no money saved up.
Exactly.
Hello everybody. My name is Ilya.
And my name is Tyler. Together we make up Cardboard Couple that loves to play board games.
And today we're going to be telling you about Rosalee.
Look how big it is.
That's what I was going to say.
Rosalee is a one to four player game designed by Atsuka Chuo and Hikabito and it's published by Uchibacoya.
Let's go to the table and let's give you an overview of how the game works.
In Rosalee, you're competing to cultivate the most impressive rose garden beginning with just a small plot of land and a couple of flowers. Over seven rounds alternating between spring and autumn, you'll plant and hybridize roses, hire gardeners, automate your garden with robots, construct new features, complete contracts, and hopefully make enough money to keep the whole operation running. At the end of the seventh round, whoever has earned the most victory points wins.
Now, each round consists of seven phases beginning with the action phase, which is where you'll make most of your major decisions. At the beginning of the action phase, everyone simultaneously chooses one available row on the action board in front of them and places an action token there. You'll then resolve an action associated with that row in turns. Most commonly, you'll perform its estate action by exhausting one of your available gardeners and paying the associated cost. You can even exhaust a second gardener and pay an increased cost to perform that action again. These estate actions are how you develop your garden. You can cultivate to purchase new roses, automate to unlock robots, construct garden features, take new contracts, develop to physically expand your garden or add greenhouses, and hire additional gardeners. Instead of performing the state action of your chosen row, you can also choose to pass.
When passing, you can choose to improve your position on the turn order track, or you can choose to gain bonuses based on your position. The other action you can take is pay to copy an estate action another player has already selected. Now, once everyone has taken their turn, you'll pass your entire action board to the player on your left. The action tokens will stay on the board, meaning fewer rows will be available when the next player receives it. At this point, you'll choose another row, take another action, and continue passing these boards around until you used all your action tokens. Now, core part of this game are the roses themselves. Basic flowers are generally purchased with coins, while more powerful hybrid flowers require specific basic flower tiles and a pollination wand. Once planted, your flowers can provide charm, different fragrances and flags, flower tiles when they bloom, and potentially victory points at the end of the game. The next phase after the action phase is the care phase, where you'll care for the roses you've planted. Every flower has a care cost, and you'll need to provide enough care points to keep it alive. Your workers, shovels, robots, and other abilities can help you maintain an increasingly large garden.
Any flower you fail to adequately care for withers, meaning you'll remove it from the garden and it'll cost you seven points at the end of the game. After the care phase comes the blooming and contract completion phase. In spring, all your flowers will bloom. In autumn, only two-season flowers normally bloom, although greenhouses can allow spring flowers to bloom as well. Every flower that blooms produces a corresponding flower tile. Now, the flower tiles can then be spent to complete contracts. Contracts can also be completed multiple times, even in the same round, moving farther down your board each time and providing different rewards along the way. Once you fully complete a contract, it'll be worth victory points at the end of the game. Next is the flower show phase where the rare hybrid flower tiles you've produced can be sold for coins or victory points.
Timing matters here because as players sell hybrid flowers, the value will decrease. Then we have the growth phase. Any seedlings you've been cultivating could grow into fully planted flowers moving into open plots in your garden activating their abilities. Then during the income and wages, you'll earn coins or victory points based on your position on the income chart. Collect any additional income your garden produces and pay the wages of the gardeners you've hired. Finally, the administration phase resets much of your garden for the next round. Refreshes the available flowers and contracts and handles several round specific effects. In autumn rounds, this is also when your debt generates interest and too much interest can turn into even more debt.
After you've played the seven rounds, you'll calculate your final score. In addition to points you've earned throughout the game, you'll score completed contracts, sets of different fragrances, character abilities, and flowers positioned around your unique garden features. You'll also convert some of your remaining resources and money into points while losing points for every withered flower and any debt or interest you have remaining. You'll tally and compare your points and the player with the most wins. Now with that quick overview out of the way, let's talk about reasons you might enjoy Rosalee.
There's a lot.
It's a big game.
Mhm.
It's a complex game. It's a game that will take a significant chunk of time when you get to playing it.
Mhm.
But boy oh boy, are you going to have a blast.
And I think we've been able to narrow it down to five major reasons you might enjoy Rosalee.
Let's get into them. Are you ready? First one, the action selection board.
Yes.
You have your little clipboard
and you're going to place your little check mark to what you want to do. Now, that decision to place which row is simultaneous. So, you can't really look to see what Tyler does before diving into your own decision. And once you've decided, you have another really hard decision to make. Which of the three actions do you want to take? Do you want to pass and potentially move up on the track, or do you want to take one of those estate actions? And do you maybe want to take it twice by spending two workers?
Yes.
That's a lot.
Yeah, I mean like we didn't even talk about the fact that these boards are passed. When you do pass them, there's an action that's going to be blocked. It's not in your control what that action is. And if you do decide that you want to copy it, you're going to have to pay the other player to be able to use that action.
Paying Tyler money that is I'm in debt for doesn't feel good. It does not feel good.
This action selection adds like a different element of timing, and you're going to want to make sure that you are able to pick and like plan through what you think is most important.
Exactly. And one of the other things to consider too is later on in the game when you do have your five actions you get to take, you'll be even more narrowed down to the actions that you can take cuz once that clipboard gets passed that fourth or fifth time or fourth time,
Mhm.
then you only have one like one spot. And four are blocked. What are you going to do?
Yeah.
What are you going to do?
That actually brings us to our second point, and that is there is an arc in this game that starts from your classic engine builder of getting everything ready and then ramping everything up to be able to complete your flower orders.
At first, it may seem a little grim. You have a lot of debt. You you have just a couple of flowers in your tiny little garden. But as the game progresses, you're able to do so much more, and it is that planning and the arc of when to decide to really shift into getting more workers, getting those hybrid flowers, and really pivoting to the gameplay so you can score the most points to get the most money. Which is a difficult choice to make. It's an arc in this game, really.
And you're not going to be able to do everything, so being able to manage what it is exactly that you are focusing on while having to juggle what everybody else is doing, perhaps overlapping on some of the contracts or the trades that you're going to be able to be making, that can cause a little bit of rift and then it may result in you slightly swapping your strategy or going even harder into it so that you can outpace your opponents.
I think that's where the replayability in this game really comes into play as well because there is that really pivotal decision you make of how much do you want to build up until you reap in all the benefits.
Mhm.
And is [clears throat] that timing going to be perfect so you reap in the most benefits? And it's so affected by what everybody else is doing, what the market share of all the flowers are, how your hybrid flowers are going. There's so many various factors that are influenced by the gameplay that you never quite know when that pivotal moment of the game is. But it's really neat to see a game almost tell a story cuz there is that kind of three stage of In the beginning, you're just a youngling building your rose garden.
Mhm.
And then you're going to have your moment of conflict, your moment of struggle. Can you really do it?
Is it possible? But then hopefully at the end you'll have a happy face, a happy ending, and you've succeeded and hopefully you'll have a lot of withered flowers, hopefully you score [clears throat] in the positive, and you just have a great time.
That's actually our third point, too, is we're going to talk about this misery feeling that you have at the very beginning. Now everybody's probably like, "Wait, hang on. If I like a game with misery, am I really Is this really something that's going to be I'm going to be drawn to?" But you're building out of the misery and that's I think what is really interesting about this game is that you start in such a position where you feel like you are basically you don't have any generational wealth. You're on your own.
You just All your money you have is from the bank. You have no money You up.
Exactly. You're on your own and you're battling to make the best of it. But all of a sudden there's competition everywhere and you are having to do duke it out with your opponents. So it is this very interesting balance of like what's happening with your opponents, what's happening with you, and then feeling like sitting in that misery for a little bit knowing that you are planning to get out of it. And it is very very very possible and it feels very fantastic when you do hit these amazing combos that push you over into the positive, into the green where you are making beautiful flowers and reaping the rewards.
This game is an emotional roller coaster. Now, I'll add to this in a more broader spectrum of a lot of games, they're just meant to capture joy and make you feel good. You're going to place an action and you're going to get something. You're going to do this, you're going to get something. You're just so happy. When I played this game for the first time in the first hour and a half I'm like, this is the worst. I'm going to score in the negative. Nothing is happening. Everything is dying. How how do people even do this? How do people run a business? How is it possible? But there's a little little bit of spark that happens midway through the game where you're just like, wait a minute. I maybe can indeed run a business and be happy and do all the things and my robots are actually caring for my plants and nothing is withering and all these tokens are surfacing and my hybrid flowers are worth so much money. And it feels really really good. So I think that's
spectrum or that progression from that miserable feeling where you're just your face is just on the table flat and you're contemplating why you decided to play this to the end of the game where it's just like, holy moly, I did that.
Yes. So that's the thing is alongside of the arc of the engine build, you get to see all of your decisions really pay off and it gives you this extremely rewarding feeling. So even though we're talking about feeling not so great at the very beginning, it actually pushes you towards a lot of great decision-making and the results of you being able to score your way into the hundreds, into the 200s, feels fantastic because you started off in such a slim desperate situation.
You did that. There was no nepotism involved.
Exactly.
[gasps]
Now, the fourth point we have is, of course, the strategic decisions in this game, but a lot of them driving from asymmetric characters. Now, if you are familiar with Sweet Land, this is a really big similarity with the two games. The mechanics and the gameplay is very different, but the one similarity they do have is they have characters that really drive how your strategy can look like.
Yes.
For example, one of the characters has an electricity reserve and they give you a little extra little robot. So, that's a way for you to potentially pivot into the robot strategy and create a lot of automation within your garden.
Mhm.
Another character, once you complete contracts, you get more money. So, maybe you're much more contract driven. And another character really focuses on that charm track. So, you really want to keep attention to your charm in order what to do. But, each of those characters really could drive how you approach this game.
Mhm.
That's exactly what I was going to say is there's so many different characters that each time you play it, you can choose to play the same character and develop your strategy with that particular character or you can go into the next character and learn a different type of strategy that maybe that one is catered to. Not only that though, between picking your characters, there's also a deck of cards that you're going to select four from that are specific to each of the characters and they can help change up the strategy just ever so slightly that makes these interesting paths of decisions of A, when are you going to unlock those buildings and B, how do those synergize together to really make sure that they're working for you.
It is a really interesting strategy development throughout the game, too. The key point in what you mentioned of deciding when to actually build one of those buildings and lock the ability is crucial. It's everything. And choosing them cuz you have seven to choose from, but you only choose four. So, again, more layers to every single gameplay and the strategy that can come with this game. And of course, there's many more layers within this game, including skill tiles which you can collect and utilize throughout the game, demand tiles which will vary the rose market, event and flag tiles which are goals that you'll aim for, managing electricity for your robots in the greenhouse, and grafts to create more flower tiles. This game has a lot of depth.
And I think finally, we can talk about our fifth point, which is maybe the obvious, but look at the art. Look at it. It is a beautiful and it follows through in the characters, in the card design, in the all of the components. It is just stunning.
It is such a pleasant experience on the table and it is I feel like this game is just special because it's really unique. The art style is very unique. It's unlike anything I've seen in this industry and I just want to see more of it. I want to discover more of the story of what happens in these rose gardens. There's so much thematic integration here and it's just it's just a joy joy to have at the table.
And that's the five reasons we think you should check out Rosalind.
We have the action selection. We have the arc that goes throughout the game, the misery and misery to joy, the the way the emotional roller coaster, the art and the theme of this game and of course, the asymmetric characters and the strategy that can develop throughout each of your game plays. Now, if you want to learn more about this game, you can click that link in the description down below. It will give you much much more information about the game and all that it has to offer. It is currently on crowdfunding. There's just a couple of days left. So, don't miss out. Be sure you check it out.
And if you like this video, make sure you hit that thumbs up button. Hit that subscribe button if you're new here cuz we love talking board games.
And for our question of the day today, you have a garden.
Oh.
But, you specialize in only planting one flower.
What flower?
Curating that flower, hybridizing that flower. What flower would it be?
Nice. Let us know your answers down in the comments below. But, until next time, we'll see you later. Bye.