A Good Thing in a Dairy Small Package

One of my favorite board games is Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar. (It's only risen in my esteem since I first played it more than a decade ago.) Many strategy games in general -- and worker placement games in particular -- ask players to "look ahead" and plan several moves in advance to succeed. They also ask you to balance long-term rewards against short-term gains. I love how Tzolk'in makes all of this so visual in the way that workers physically move around the game board. It's something that few other games pull off. So when I heard about the game Fromage, it rocketed to the top of the list of games I wanted to pick up.

Fromage is a game about -- what else? -- making cheese. It's played on a circular game board divided into four sections. On each turn, you may place up to two of your three "workers" into the section in front of you -- one to gather a specific resource, and the other to make a cheese and score points. Players make their placements simultaneously in the section before them, and then the board rotates to bring the next section to you.

Every decision is a time investment. Each "worker" is a wedge of cheese, and once you place it, it's gone until the tip of that wedge has rotated far enough around the board to point back at you. That is: each worker you place will remain spent for one to three turns, as you chose when you placed it. The longer you give up the worker, the more resources you'll gather, or the more high-valued cheese you can make.

There are all sorts of subtle ramifications within this system. Your three workers also have colors (for hard, soft, and blue cheese), and any cheese-making requires both the matching color and that time investment. You may know what you want to do, but you have to have the right "worker" to do it. The space also has to be available to you, without an opponent's worker already on it when a new section rotates to you.

With this system, designers Matthew O'Malley and Ben Rosset have pulled off something quite extraordinary. In my view, Fromage provides nearly all of the decisions (and satisfaction I find making them) that Tzolk'in provides. Yes it does so in a game that plays in 1/3 the time. A group of four players with just one or two games under their belt can finish a game of Fromage in under half an hour -- a shockingly tight time frame for a game that packs this much strategic crunch.

In that 30-or-so minutes, you have to make decisions about where to focus your attention. Among the game's separate "competitions," you have to decide where to push for first place and where to settle for second. You have to manage conversions from one type of resource to another. You have the ability to mess up your opponents' plans, and you have to deal with with an opponent messing up yours.

But... you also have to accept a theme that to me only feels half complete. Everything about cheese types, spending time as cheese "ages," filling orders, managing resources -- all that feels as well-themed as any board game of this nature, and certainly as on point as (or more so than) Tzolk'in. But then there's the part about how you score points at the end of the game.

Each of the four sections of the game board is essentially its own "mini-game" with its own rules about how points are scored. They're all essentially a form of area control. One is an actual map where you try to get the most cheese touching each province. One is a grid where you seek to build the longest chain you can before being cut off by opponents. The other two are even more abstract, asking you to pair up or isolate your cheeses to maximize points. Nominally, this is because your cheese is being served at a festival, a bistro, or some such... but ultimately, it's a handful of ways to score, each balanced through playtesting such that any one is as valid as any other. And kind of as flavorless as any other too.

This aspect of the game really challenges my priors when it comes to board gaming. I have always thought myself to be a board gamer for whom thematic considerations don't hold much sway. You say we're colonizing a planet in this game? Building a historic bridge in that game? Tiling a cathedral's mosaic? Whatever -- what are we actually doing, game-wise? And yet, there's something about having Fromage's theme, so strong in so many aspects, and so incidental in others, that makes me better understand the "point salad" criticism some gamers level at some games.

Despite that, I can't be down completely on a game that scratches the same itch as Tzolk'in in a new way. I certainly can't be down on a 30-minute game that packs as much strategic punch as many 90-minute games. So in the end, I think I give Fromage a B+. We'll see what kind of staying power it has in my game group... but shorter games do tend to have the edge these days, so I'd say the odds look pretty good. Bon appétit!