Time for another Throwback Thursday! I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk about a thematically paired evening we’ve all either done or thought about doing with these two games. Twice now we’ve invited friends over to play Fromage and Viticulture, drink (non-alcoholic) wine and eat (vegan) cheese. While I didn’t make anything homemade for these two game nights, we did have delicious cheese. In particular, we love the Laughing Cow Plant Based Cheese, the Babybel Plant Based Cheese, Millsie/Spread ‘Em and the Boursin Dairy Free Spread. That’s what’s available around here in Canada, hopefully you can find similarly delicious things! Read on to find out more about the games.

At a Glance…

Fromage

In Fromage, you are trying to be the best cheese maker, using a fast and fun simultaneous worker placement mechanism. The board is divided into quadrants, and each turn you can only place workers in the quadrant facing you. You can put a worker in the upper portion to get resources and/or lower portion for point scoring opportunities, but not more than one in each of those areas. Your workers are specialized in that when you place them in the lower area, they are specifically trained to either make soft, yellow, or blue cheese. The spots in both sections are also made in such a way so that the workers will either be facing left, up, or right. This is because at the end of each round, you rotate the board one quadrant, and then any workers facing you come home. So the ones you placed to the right are less powerful, but will come home faster. As soon as someone has placed their last cheese, the game ends and you score up each quadrant in different ways (like area control, sets, connected lines, etc.). There are also fun animals, buildings, and jams involved as well. We played this first on Board Game Arena, and while it was tricky to learn there, we knew it had a lot of potential and I’m glad we backed it on kickstarter! I did love a good camembert or brie before becoming vegan, and this lets me remember those days in a very quick and strategic game.

Viticulture

Viticulture was one of our early purchases in our gaming library, and we definitely haven’t regretted it. It’s a fantastic worker placement game where the spin is that your workers get placed into seasons, and once placed they must stay there the entire year (round). So you have to think carefully about how you want to allocate your workers for each season. In it, you are trying to grow grapes to eventually harvest and turn into wine to fulfill orders. You can build structures to give you bonuses, have visitors come to assist you, and get more workers throughout the game. I have even seen people win just through the cards, though I do feel it goes against the spirit of the game, haha. The expansions are great and add lots of variability. The World expansion even makes it cooperative! We haven’t tried the latest expansion (Bordeaux), but have heard fantastic things about it. Definitely worth picking up if you like worker placement! Pairs nicely with cheese, bread, and French/Italian music 🙂

Want to buy these games? Check out your friendly local game store (FLGS), Amazon [here], or get a first-order discount at Board Game bliss [here].

Get Fromage on Amazon.com or Viticulture at Amazon.com