Hello everyone!
How are you today? Summer is already coming to an end, and it already feels like a new cycle is starting. Today I want to bring you a game that talks about cheese, something I find absolutely delicious. What could be better in autumn than a cheese board and a glass of wine? So let’s see how this beautiful game plays.
Game Overview
Fromage is a 2024 release for 1-4 players, ages 14+, with a playtime of 30-45 minutes. It was designed by Matthew O’Malley and Ben Rosset, illustrated by Pavel Zhovba, and published by Road to Infamy Games. I own the english retail version.
Theme
In Fromage, you’re a cheesemaker in early 20th-century France, making, aging, and selling your artisanal cheeses. You’ll sell through 4 venues: the festival, the fromagerie, the bistro, and the villes.
How to Win
The player with the most prestige points wins. There are 8 different ways to gain points that, all together, give your final score: 4 come from mini-games tied to each of the venues, and the other 4 come from your structures, your fruits (used both fresh and in jams), your fulfilled orders, and your unused resources (every 2 unused resources earns you 1 point).
Setup
Setup is really quick. Take the 4 parts of the board and place inside each a matching quadrant based on your player count, arranging them into a circle like a puzzle. There’s no set order for the parts, so you’ll get different combinations from play to play. Place the resource tile at the center, then randomly place the customer tokens on the villes venue to finish the board setup.
For player setup, give each player a random player board, 15 cheeses in their colour, and 3 workers. Each worker is tied to a cheese type, soft, hard, or bleu, matching the worker base it’s attached to. Based on each player’s position at the table and their board, give them their starting resources.
For more variability, and not recommended on your first play, you can draft Structure Tiles. Each player takes 4 random tiles, keeps 1, and passes the rest along, repeating until everyone has chosen 4. Since your player board already comes with structures printed on it, this draft gives you the option to swap in different ones, adding more variability and challenge.
Components
Inside the box, for the retail version I own, you’ll find two inserts for resources and order cards, tokens to punch out, 4 player board parts, several board quadrants, structure tiles, and a deck of order cards.
Gameplay
The gameplay of this worker-placement game is easy to pick up. On each turn, players simultaneously place 1-2 workers: one on the resources section (the middle of the board) and the other on a venue to make cheese, placing a cheese token below the worker.
Once all players have finished their turn, the board is turned clockwise and play continues, but this time with a new face turned to you. Each player plays on a different venue each turn, and players never play the same venue at the same time.
So how do you retrieve your workers? You only have 3, so if you place two each round, by round two you’re already short. Recovering workers is part of the process: at the start of each turn, after the board turns, you retrieve any workers that are placed on other venues but now pointing back to you. Where they end up pointing depends on how long you want to age your cheese. When placing a worker, you choose it based on the type of cheese you want to make and how long you want to age it, represented by bronze, silver, and gold plates. The longer you age it, the longer your worker stays on that venue.
Play continues turn after turn until a player has used all of their cheeses, which triggers the end of the game. The game ends immediately, and any workers still on the board are retrieved.
Resources
Besides making cheese, the resources you gather at the center of the board also come into play. Structures are one of these resources: you collect structure pieces there, and once you have enough (constructing a structure can require 1 or several pieces), you can build the structures printed on your player board. Only structures you’ve actually built give you their benefit or count for end-game scoring.
Cows work the same way, gathered from the resources area and placed on your board. They let you place an extra cheese without needing a worker for it, a nice one-time bonus per Milking Parlour, though different parlours require different numbers of cows.
Fruit lets you make cheeses that require it, either as fresh fruit or turned into jam. At the end of the game, you score by multiplying the number of fruits you used by the number of jams you made, so it pays off to diversify rather than putting all your fruit into just one or the other.
Orders are the fourth resource type: you draw Order Cards, each showing a required cheese type and age. Whenever you make a cheese that matches one of your open orders, you can complete it right away. At the end of the game, your completed orders are scored using a table on the board, the more orders you’ve fulfilled, the more each one is worth.
Solo Mode
The solo mode is really easy to manage. To set it up, take one of the boards and turn it to its reverse side. Each side has a difficulty level, so start at level 1 and increase from there, for 4 levels total. Place cheese cubes on the tracks and you’re ready to start.
Each turn, the automa plays first by taking an order card and placing a cheese on the matching one. If none is available, the automa keeps the card, which is worth 3 points at the end of the game. Each level introduces a new rule, like solving two orders per round from the middle of the game onward, or retrieving fruits when making a fruit cheese. The automa scores based on its own player board.
There’s no opponent to draft against in solo, so instead you draw 4 tiles and keep 1, then draw 3 and keep 1, then draw 2 and keep 1, and finally draw 1 last tile. Everything not picked goes back in the box.
My Experience
I’ve already played this game several times, mostly solo and only once at 3 players. I’ve tested all four difficulty levels now. I love that I can quickly set it up and play, from setup to scoring it takes less than 45 minutes total, making it a great game for shorter gaming sessions.
The rules are easy, and as soon as you realise that placing your worker for a gold cheese means you’ll only get it back 3 turns later, you learn to plan ahead so you don’t end up out of workers (if all your workers are stuck on long-aging cheeses, you can end up with a turn where there’s nothing left to do). I really enjoy trading to maximize my points at each venue. The scoring is really different from venue to venue: the villes score by cheese presence in each French region, the fromagerie by exposition variability, the festival by orthogonally adjacent cheeses, and the bistro by your own cheeses at each table. The mini-games are pretty straightforward, and after two plays you already know how to score each one and can focus on finding the best combination for the most points. I also find it really thematic that leaving a worker on the board longer or shorter depends on how much you’re aging your cheese, it makes you think carefully about your strategy, almost like you’re actually waiting for a cheese to mature.
Solo, my first play landed at 59, and since then my average has been around 71, with a max of 80 so far. In solo, just watch out for the automa, which can speed up the end of the game, especially from level 2 onward with its two order cards resolved per round.
I also tried level 4, the hardest difficulty, and lost 60 to 68, a great challenge! At this level, the automa starts resolving two order cards per turn even sooner, keeps accumulating fruits, and adds a new twist: if the last card it played requires a silver or gold aged cheese, it blocks you from retrieving 2 or 3 of your resources. I really enjoyed this play, and I’ll definitely be coming back to try and beat the automa.
At multiplayer, I’ve only played once, and since this game gets easier with practice, I had a real edge: it was already my 4th play, while it was everyone else’s first, so I scored much higher than them. Most likely, if we’d played a second time, that gap wouldn’t have been nearly as big.
On material quality: the tokens are all cardboard, and the quality is good, same for the rest of the components. I own Formaggio’s deluxe version, so I can compare a bit: the main difference worth mentioning is that the deluxe resources are in wood instead of cardboard, and they really do feel better on the table to touch. Still, the retail/regular version of Fromage is really good on its own, and if you’re on a budget, it’s more than enough. Despite Fromage and Formaggio being quite similar games, I’ll cover Formaggio in a separate review, so I can properly focus on the game itself, how it differs from Fromage, and how it plays when you mix both games together.
My Rating
Note: 8/10
I really like the simultaneous play and how easy the automa is to run. It’s not a revolutionary game, and it’s not a big combo game either, you don’t have a huge number of different actions to choose from, but that’s exactly its charm: you get to enjoy it without stress. The game can feel a little overwhelming at first, with plate colours (age), cheese colours (type), different scoring conditions per location, plus cows, buildings, and fruits all in play, but after one or two plays it just clicks and becomes a nice, brainy game that’s wonderful on the table, with beautiful cheese illustrations that even include notes for each cheese.
Final Thoughts
Fromage won me over with how smoothly it plays despite everything going on beneath the surface. It’s the kind of game that rewards a couple of plays with real clarity, and once it clicks, it’s a genuinely relaxing, satisfying puzzle to sit down with, solo or with others.
I think this is a really good game to bring to a board game night, for new and experienced players alike. For newcomers to the hobby, it’s not necessarily the very first game I’d hand someone, but it’s a great one of the firsts, easy to teach and quick to click. For experienced players, there’s real enjoyment in managing your workers well, and it makes for a more relaxed session with less heavy decision-making than usual. I can picture this game perfectly on a late afternoon with friends, a real board of cheese to snack on, a glass of wine, maybe even a fireplace going if the weather allows it (here in Portugal, autumn can still be too warm for that, so a bit of air conditioning works just as well!).
Your Turn
Have you tried Fromage yet? I’d love to know how your first few plays went, and whether you found the venues as fun to optimize as I did!
Come share your comments on Mastodon, Facebook, and BoardGameGeek.
Related Links
Videos
- Fromage Board Game Review - A review from Tantrum House
- Fromage solo playthrough - A solo mode playthrough from Rahdo