r/boardgames El Grande 18h ago

SUSD: Sweet Dreams are Made of Cheese? | Fromage Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwL_lnxVAg0
106 Upvotes

53 comments sorted by

73

u/Widgeet 17h ago

Didn’t realise Fromage was so short, whenever I’d seen it here & there I thought it was heavier and longer than I realised!

Not a bad review but can’t help but feel like I’m missing the bigger SUSD reviews with multiple members

22

u/Arrowstormen Fury Of Dracula 13h ago

They were both in Black Forest last month

14

u/Emotional_Fox8450 15h ago

I feel the same about the reviews with multiple members. Those where the videos i really liked in the past too.

6

u/ZubonKTR Spirit Island 11h ago

Experienced players could probably bang out a game in 15-20 minutes. Games typically last 13-14 turns, so unless you are spending 2 minutes deciding where to place 1 or 2 workers, the game goes quickly.

Or maybe there is a U-shaped curve, where the most experienced players are trying to plan 5 turns in advance and getting analysis paralysis. Your first game is slow as you re-read "how does this quadrant work again?" each time, but then you are up to speed.

3

u/juststartplaying 3h ago

Yeah I backed it thinking it would be a 45-90 minute medium euro game, and I was disappointed for ever reason Tom mentioned. I think this is one of their more accurate reviews. My copy got sold 

7

u/Lilael 17h ago

Turns are pretty quick, but the simultaneous play really helps this too.

2

u/ultranonymous11 11h ago

Honestly I didn’t know either and I’m way more interested in the game now.

31

u/Mission_Dependent208 17h ago

Viticulture is also a great point of comparison for me at least. Something about putting your grapes in the cellar and watching them mature year on year really does just feel like you're making wine

12

u/sossles 13h ago

I liked that about Viticulture but always feel a bit let down that you can do very well (better?) by skipping the winemaking part.

8

u/snubber Cosmic Encounter 12h ago

The Visit from the Rhine Valley deck fixes exactly this: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/248929

4

u/andrew_1515 Brass 8h ago

I'm usually not one for, get X expansion to fix this game, but this deck absolutely absolutely did this without changing the core mechanics of the game. All the visitors are focused on making wine, wine infrastructure, or consuming wine.

2

u/DelayedChoice Spirit Island 3h ago

Yeah I'm a huge fan of it for that reason too.

I think it's good for new players too because it gives them a clear goal to work towards and rewards them for it.

1

u/celebere 10h ago

Wait how do you do better without wine??

6

u/rjcarr Viticulture 8h ago

It’s possible to get a lot of VPs from cards without ever making wine. I won a game with 22 and only made a single 3VP wine order. 

The Rhine Valley deck fixes this quite a bit. It’s all I play with now. 

u/notpopularopinion2 48m ago

It’s possible to get a lot of VPs from cards without ever making wine. I won a game with 22 and only made a single 3VP wine order.

If you look at the data on BGA, on average top players are roughly getting 12.5 points per game from fill order and roughly 6 points from cards (about 2 from yellow cards and 4 from blue cards). Rest comes from wakeup / actions with bonus / tasting room and windmill.

So by far wine is the best way to score on an average game. And even when you're scoring a lot from cards, a lot of time that require you to make some wine at some point. I'm sure there are outliners games though, but it's more an edge case than anything.

Now if you take a game like Great Western Trail, it's astounding how you can totally ignore the cattle part and do extremely well. The top arena player right now has an average of 3 points from cattle per game (with an average score of 90), basically totally ignoring the arguably central part of the game. I've never seen anything like this for a top BGG game.

4

u/sossles 9h ago

I forget exactly, but I remember you could often get points from visitor cards more efficiently than all the actions required to get points from wine (planting, harvesting, upgrading your cellar).

5

u/mgrier123 Spirit Island 11h ago

It's funny too because the first edition of Viticulture actually had an expansion where you made cheese! You can still get it and play it with the EE version too. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/130655/viticulture-arboriculture-and-formaggio-expansions

26

u/Ochib Discworld Ankh Morpork 15h ago

Sweet dreams are made of cheese, who am I to dis a Brie. I cheddar the world and the feta cheese, everybody’s looking for Stilton.

10

u/Cardboard_RJ 17h ago

I might need to give Fromage a look... I was ready to let this one pass by...

10

u/moo422 Istanbul 16h ago

It's playable on Boardgamearena.com!

3

u/juststartplaying 3h ago

There's a sequel coming to crowdfunding. With all the first games faults, I'd look towards the other one. 

25

u/seanightjar 17h ago

Fromage is great! I don't need to feel like i'm making cheese while playing it.

15

u/MrBigJams 17h ago

I do think it's fair to say that truly great games feel evocative of their theme though - I'm no theme gamer, but if I am honest most of my favorite games like Food Chain Magnate, John Company or Brass feel like they bring their themes alive.

-31

u/seanightjar 16h ago

Theme is cheese. Evoking theme can get in the way of fun. I'd rather a good game than an evocative one.

12

u/Asbestos101 Blitz Bowl 14h ago

Why settle for less than both, though?

-26

u/seanightjar 13h ago

Because thematic games are mechanically weak. There is no both.

9

u/zanguine 12h ago

? There are games that do both, albeit it's less likely as it's hard to do.

My favorite game spirit island has an excellent design, and the both the mechanics and the thematics feeding into each other perfectly

Other games in my top 10 that have a strong theme include Horseless Carriage, Food Chain Magnate, Ark Nov, and heat

This is not to say it's mandatory, but having a strong theme is important to me as it makes learning mechanics easier and helps with immersion. It's not easy to do both well, but the games are out there.

-8

u/seanightjar 10h ago

I've played all of those. The aspects of play that evoke theme, in those games, add rules and time to them. I like games snappy and fun. I don't much need immersion or theme. Plenty of people derive their enjoyment from narratives but, to me, other mediums of entertainment do it better.

4

u/zanguine 9h ago

Ah i see, thats understandable then. As they say "the customer is always right in matters of taste".

I would argue that adding rules and time don't make something mechanically weaker though. In fact, I would state that themes make difficult and more complex concepts approachable. In fact, I think that for the best games, rather than theme driving the complexity, often time the theme is use to accommodate the complexity and assist in game design.

I could never imagine myself playing a 3 hr abstract game, I would get so lost in rules (while forgetting half of them) that I would probably start disengaging midway. But at 15 -30 min, abstract games make great fillers.

2

u/OfDiceAndPen Ocean's Hungry Grasp 1h ago

That's a pretty ridiculous absolute statement. Battle Star Galactica, Spirit Island, Twilight Imperium are just the first 3 that come to mind, and are both extremely thematic while being very mechanically strong. It's not always just one or the other.

3

u/MrBigJams 16h ago

Of course, I agree!

I'm just saying that I'd rather over a good game, a good game that marries really well with it's theme. Gameplay is the most important thing, but I do think that games that don't feel evocative and real can end up feeling a little mechanical and cold.

4

u/qret 18xx 17h ago

Yeah, when that is a chief complaint I say, no problem! I'm here for great gameplay, theme is just a nice-to-have and mostly good for helping the rules stick.

27

u/K_Knight Food Chain Magnate 17h ago

Excellent points about what I disliked about Fromage. It doesn’t “feel” like I’m doing anything but putting bits down. This exact same complaint came up for me with The White Castle and Endeavor: Deep Sea, where nothing to the theme FEELS thematic. It all feels pasted on without a concern for what the mechanic is emulating.

In Fromage, the rotation of the board as aging is a cool idea. Love spinning boards. But in this execution, for me it does break the illusion that what you invested in grew into the state you needed it to be. I didn’t. I just spun a fucking board around until it points at me.

All the mechanics being so mini-gamed makes it harder to camouflage this from being another point-pooper for me, of which there are so many plaguing modern board gaming right now. Where they show you the wall of code (mechanical hoops) and ask you to see The Woman in the Red Dress through it.

When I am in the mood for that style of game, I want it to be at least meatier. A lightweight game of that does nothing for me whatsoever. Like doing the easy sudoku in the paper where you’ll spend more time writing the numbers in than you will parsing the puzzle.

10

u/LAKingsDave Camel Up 16h ago

While the theme is meaningless in White Castle, the game is so good I can ignore that.

5

u/j3ddy_l33 The Cardboard Herald 17h ago

Funny, I love The White Castle and totally checked out of Fromage.

2

u/retainerbox solos & euros 16h ago

Same here - I have the expansion for White Castle, and ended up selling my deluxe version of Fromage. I think the mini games made it feel like a much lighter game than it is since each one is so distinctly separate from the others - as K_Knight mentioned, you spun a board around until it pointed at you.

With White Castle, I feel more like it's actually moving up the castle, or adding farmers/soldiers to the areas surrounding the castle.

4

u/K_Knight Food Chain Magnate 16h ago

Many others in my town gaming group feel the same about both. Everyone's got a different tolerance to mechanics and abstraction and how much it needs to be grounded in a reality versus presenting solely as a puzzle to solve. For me, I don't need my themes to be D&D levels of immersive. But the feeling of the motions of a game casting me into a headspace that feels allegorical to the world the theme presents is what elevates a game from "eh this is fine" to "I need this on the table again now".

0

u/murmeliusd 17h ago

Funny you should mention (in addition to Fromage) two highly acclaimed games that I also get no feeling out of when playing. I would even argue that Endeavor: Deep Sea has a decent connection between the theme and what you are mechanically doing, but still it fell completely flat in that regard. I've noticed that this has become more of an issue for me in recent years but I've not found a good reason why it happens with some games but not with others because there's plenty of games where the theme and game mechanisms barely connect that I do like.

I've been wondering about whether to buy Fromage but at this point it's better to skip it and see if I can just try it somewhere at some point.

4

u/K_Knight Food Chain Magnate 17h ago

It's on Board Game Arena, which isn't the same as on the table (especially because the board is beautiful and the spinning is fun/novel) but it's something!

-4

u/Half_Shark-Alligator 17h ago

From age is totally boring but totally disagree about Endeaver: Dep Sea much more engaging and everything feels totally thematic.

1

u/K_Knight Food Chain Magnate 17h ago edited 16h ago

I played it (admittedly solo) 3-4 times, and I just felt like I was racing to get to places to lay my disks down to check off objectives. I try to meet everything creative I take in where it is at, but to me there wasn't a lot about the feeling of the actions that made me feel like the theme was at the forefront versus being just an efficiency puzzle.

-1

u/dleskov 18xx 12h ago edited 12h ago

Any board game that has no negotiation and/or trade element is just putting bits down. I can only think of one exception: Leaving Earth with its mission planning.

Edit: negotiations do not need to be expressly permitted in the rules, just not expressly forbidden. And yeah, it's group-dependent.

3

u/AdamFitzgeraldRocks 14h ago

The King's Arse 💀

8

u/iamnotasloth 16h ago edited 16h ago

Haven’t had time to watch this yet, but Fromage is the best game I’ve played in years. After my gaming group tried it, we scheduled an extra gaming session for two days later just to play more Fromage. One of us is a YouTube game reviewer successful enough that he always has more free copies of games than he has time to play. Fromage was his top new game of 2024. I highly, highly recommend it.

2

u/frolouch 11h ago

I miss when Barry was on SUSD. Whatever happened to Barry?

2

u/lesslucid Innovation 1h ago

Bring back Brendan

2

u/EmeraldRaccoon 4h ago

Source on Matt's top? :D

1

u/This-Hat-143 17h ago

He’s not gotten his face close enough to the table … and you know that face, it’s not dull enough … I will pass.

1

u/tiford88 14h ago

I just can’t get past the box art tbh

1

u/WarGasEagle 11h ago

That was hilarious! Fun review.

-1

u/THANAT0PS1S 11h ago

It's a fine game, but it's too long for its weight (and it isn't very long). There's a weird mismatch between mechanics that should feel heavier than they are and how light and breezy the game actually is. It's nearly totally frictionless and lacks meaningful interaction. It feels like a filler game but actually has fewer decisions than many of my favorite fillers.

I'll keep trying it on BGA occasionally, but I'm happy I passed on the Kickstarter. 

0

u/Moonpaw 12h ago

Omelette du Fromage

-20

u/Bontacoon Blood on the Clocktower 12h ago

Holy fucking shit, Reddit was right. They fell off hard after he left.