Let’s get some data out of the way first!
Data
Okay, okay, Rosenberg Data
| Game |
Owned |
Played Multiplayer |
Played Solo |
| Agricola |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small |
Yes |
I think so! |
No |
| At the Gates of Loyang |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
| Caverna: The Cave Farmers |
Yes |
No |
Learning Game |
| Fields of Arle |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
| Glass Road |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
| Hallertau |
Yes |
No |
No |
| Indian Summer |
Yes |
No |
No |
| Le Havre |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
| Nusfjord |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
| Ora et Labora |
Yes |
No |
No |
| Spring Meadow |
Yes |
No |
No |
| — |
— |
— |
— |
| TOTALS |
12 |
2 |
6.5 |
I feel like, when I was getting into the hobby back some 10+ years ago, the different online communities seemed to think you had to have an opinion on both Rosenberg and Feld before you could be a “euro gamer”. Now, I realize that it’s nonsense to think that, but I certainly did back then.
When I was first trying to figure out what kinds of games I like, I was strongly recommended to check out Agricola by a friend of a friend of a brother-in-law – said friend said it was her absolute favorite game ever; hard to argue with praise like that. And Agricola is a great game; I just don’t like playing it.
Or, rather, maybe I should say… I would play it and have a great time with it multiplayer if that’s what someone wanted to do at my table (or at a table where I’m a guest), but it doesn’t happen. And I played Agricola solo once (well, it was a series of solo games I think? Isn’t the solo game a series of 3, maybe?) And I genuinely enjoyed it; but everything Agricola does well, I think I can find somewhere else… most likely in another Uwe sandbox Middle Ages game. As far as the things that I don’t necessarily care for are:
- The large deck of cards of which you will see very few, and, as the game unfolds, you will play even fewer. Give me an exciting deck of cards, yes! But let me use the cards. We’re talking about a thick stack of Chekhov’s Guns here.
- I don’t want to feed my family. I do enough of that even day. This is a tight, economic game and thematically “starving” my family and resorting to begging so that I could spend the time, instead, learning how to be a Basket Weaver because that’ll help make more victory points next year.
After I got Agricola but before I had enough knowledge, wisdom and/or insight to know how I really felt about it, I was already looking for “another” Rosenberg game. Ora et Labora ended up on my radar followed shortly by Glass Road. A few others followed those.
I convinced my partner and a couple of my friends who were also newly exploring board games to play Agricola with me once; most people were ho-hum afterwards, but my partner showed some amount of enthusiasm, though during the game she definitely struggled with the sandboxiness of the design. As a result, shortly thereafter, I picked up Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small because it seemed to me like a great 2-player game that does a lot of what I enjoyed about Agricola and not much clutter. We did play it once, but I certainly don’t remember any specifics.
A few years later, I still hadn’t tracked down copies of Ora et Labora or Glass Road, but Indian Summer came out and I remember thinking Cottage Garden looked pretty good, but Indian Summer had a better, in my opinion, color palette and seemed a bit more my style. I should have waited for Spring Meadow, if I had known it would be a thing, because I think it’s even more my style, though the colors aren’t as good. My partner does like polyomino style mobile games, but I’ve always been wary of introducing her to boardgames because I have better spatial/areal awareness than her and I fear she may get frustrated, as she is very competitive (this is also why I’ve rarely given AffO any thought, even though the bulk of my gaming is done solo these days).
Eventually, Le Havre popped up on my radar because it had just got another printing and it looked like a great multiplayer game that also had a highly touted solo mode. My partner got it for me for Christmas, 2018, and I played it, I think, right around that time, solo. I think the solo mode is okay but the multiplayer is, hopefully, where it shines, or it won’t earn a permanent spot in my collection.
At some point, I managed to find a copy of Caverna: The Cave Farmers locally secondhand; I’m still slightly mad that they decided it needed to be a 7-player game, have an enormous box, and weigh just slightly less than if it included real dwarves and real gold. It seemed to address a lot of my issues with Agricola, have a great setting that included fantasy and whimsy (rather than dirt farming and poverty). I’ve set out a few times to get it played solo; and I’ve gotten so close – I really just need to get it played.
Eventually I picked up Glass Road on a deal of the day/week special somewhere, and then found Spring Meadow, At the Gates of Loyang, and Nusfjord in various BGG auctions when COVID lockdowns flooded the secondary market with tons of games. And then I bought Ora et Labora when the new printing was released using some birthday money.
At the Gates of Loyang was/is talked about quite a bit in solo-gaming corners of the Internet, so I was eager to give that a try; which is also the case with Glass Road. Both of their solo modes are different than their multiplayer modes by some degree (though that, too, is very common with Rosenberg, isn’t it?). Both were good… not great.
I can think back to before 2017; before I had children and most of my gaming was done with 3 or 4 people at the table – I remember seeing Fields of Arle on the shelf at my FLGS and I remember thinking, “That box is huge for only being a 2-player game!” Eventually, my entire gaming hobby got flipped, turned upside down and suddenly I wasn’t even looking at the “2” in the “1-2 players” player count when I looked at Fields of Arle again. It may have been in response to someone here on these fora (Yashima, maybe?) that prompted me to take another look. I’m glad I did… as I immediately found a bucolic sandbox that does a lot of what I want out of a Rosenberg game but without being depressing or austere.
At some point, before I had played Fields of Arle, I had picked up a copy of Hallertau secondhand on that first wave of “I bought it, but it’s not the new hotness anymore” and I was very excited to try it, but I decided to try FoA first and haven’t ever actually gotten back around to it.
All-in-all, I like serene, bucolic themes/settings and I tend to like the Rosenberg “you do a thing and then you can do the thing better and then you can do the other thing better, but if you want to do the first thing better, you have to do another thing, but that can be done better if you do the second thing first” – essentially, you have a cart, a horse, and you can put the cart before the horse, or the horse before the cart, and both are valid, and at the end, the cart and the horse both turn into some number of victory points.
I look forward to, at some point, playing Don’t Sort Your Beans Bohnanza; a game that I’ve never actually heard anyone talk bad about… but… I’ve never been enthusiastic about the concept. I’m sure it’s great.
Also looking forward to Oranienburger Kanal (a.k.a. Kanal in it’s next release) which got a ton of talk on BGG in the last few months… but… it’s hard to tell if it’s because it’s a good game, or if a bunch of people were just feeling smug that they got to play a limited-release Rosenberg game.
I would play New York Zoo if it appeared on the table in front of me… but… that… that would be spooky.
)
which I always do I guess.