Fromage Review - Say Cheese!

It’s the early 20th century, and as an artisanal French cheese maker, your to-do list keeps growing! There’s the cheese to make, of course, but do you have everything you need for the cheese festival? Are you ready to deliver your cheese around France? These questions, and more, curdle players in the all-new board game Fromage designed by Ben Rosset & Matthew O'Malley (The Search for Planet X), and published by R2i Games.

What Is Fromage?

Fromage is a simultaneous worker placement board game where players take on the role of French cheesemakers, trying to gain prestige points to become the best in all of France.

Fromage Stats:

• 1 - 4 Players
• Est. Game Time: 30 - 45 min.
• Game Genre: Simultaneous Worker Placement
• Complexity: Medium+

In the game, you’ll use your limited amount of workers to make cheese and place that cheese in various parts of a rotating board. Each player has 15 cheese tokens, and the game ends when one player places their final token. From there, you’ll tally up points you gain in four different sections of the board, and your own personal player mat, and the player with the most points wins.

How Do You Play Fromage?

Fromage is all about carefully planning out your turns to balance using your limited workers - of which you only have three - either to gather resources (needed to gain various benefits), or to make cheese on the quadrant of the board currently facing you.

And that’s the most crucial part of Fromage, in my opinion, that bit about “currently facing you.” Implementing a unique rondel component for the central board, you’ll assign your workers to the quarter of the board facing you at the table.

Then, once everyone has played their workers and the round ends, the board rotates one quarter of the way around. You recover any worker of yours currently pointing at you when the board rotates. Less valuable/quicker actions will have your worker pointing at you the next turn of the game, but longer actions could take up to three turns.

Though hard to describe in writing, this is one of the most unique mechanics I’ve come across in a worker placement game.

So Much To Do At The Dairy Farm!

I love this style of worker-placement game, where you have so many options, and can see so many different paths to victory laid out ahead of you. The four main quadrants of the board, called venues, each offer a tantalizing way to earn victory points - but you’ll only see them once every four spins.

First, there’s the Festival venue, where you’ll show off your cheeses to crowds at a cheese festival in the town square (I want to go to a cheese festival in my town square!), and you score points by making orthogonally adjacent cheeses on the game board grid.

The Fromagerie venue is all about placing down cheeses on shelves to gain immediate resources in return, and you’ll score in the end for have cheese on different shelves. This is a great venue for trading some lighter points for useful resources like fruit (which some cheese spots across the four venues call for).

Third is the Bistro venue, where you’ll offer up your cheeses at a prestigious French restaurant for pairings. Each time you successfully pair two cheeses of your own on the same table, you’ll increase the value of all your cheeses at this venue.

And finally there’s the Villes venue, which is - I’m not joking - a fun little area control portion of the game where you’re trying to deliver cheese to cities across France to grow your customer base.

There’s so much to do, and it would be in your best interest to mostly ignore some of these venues and focus on gathering resources and honing in on one section - but that’s easier said than done when every rotation of the board opens up new possibilities.

Fromage Final Thoughts

As you can tell from this review, I’m totally enamored with Fromage. I think this is an absolutely unique gameplay style, with a fun and innovative approach to worker placement that I’ve not come across previously. 

I really like how each venue feels very different from one another, and though I didn’t cover it much here in this review, you have your own player board that allows you to stash resources needed to gain extra points and build up your farm.

Though the order cards, and some upgrades to your farm, feel a little under-ripened (who has enough time in this game to devote to special orders and fully upgrading?), it all works together to hint at many different areas of opportunity to score points.

All said, if you’re looking for a new take on worker placement, then it may just be time to get cheesy with Fromage!

The copy of Fromage used in the creation of this review was provided by Asmodee USA.