Latest / Pick Up and Deliver / Uwe Rosenberg (Great Designers)
Transcript
- Untitled - July 18, 2025 00:00:00 Speaker: Welcome to pick Up and Deliver the podcast, where I pick up my audio recorder as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode to you while I stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good morning, listeners. It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. I'm out for a stroll and enjoying myself. I we have my wife regularly gets access to uncorrected proofs and advanced reader copies, and there's not really anything we can do with them when we're done, because you can't really sell them. I mean, I guess you could sell them online if we want, but we like to give them we got them for free, so we like to give them away. So we've started sprinkling them in the little Free Libraries around here. So I've planned a route today where I'm going to swing by five little Free Libraries and put one in each library, so that'll be amusing. While I'm doing that, I'm going to record two episodes of the podcast. I've been really doubling down on getting episodes into the can because we're going to be gone for a week and I don't want to screw with my schedule. Although frankly, at the at the current pace that I'm at, I'm going to hit the season end well before I get to the end of the. Oh poor bird. I just watched a bird chasing a big bug and they dipped and dived and swooped and swung and the bug got away and the bird didn't get it. Too bad for the bird. Um, so if I keep at the current pace, I will run out of. I will hit episode 800 well before mid December, which is when I usually like to have the season wrap up. So we'll see what happens. Sometimes I am not able to keep this blistering pace at times. Sometimes I'll go a week or two without posting. We'll see. I guess I could just when I go on vacation, just go a week without posting, but whatever. I'm I'm on it. So anyway, that's where we are. I was looking over my recent episodes and I was thinking, it's been a while since I've done a great designer. I did one earlier this spring. I talked about Ostby and Svensson, and before that I did Kramer and Kiessling. So I was looking over and I realized I have never done an Oov Rosenberg episode. What? That can't be true. Brendan. You've talked you've been talking about Rosenberg from the beginning. He's your second most collected designer after Martin Wallace. That's not true. Vladimir Sushi is. He's your third most collected designer, after Martin Wallace and Vladimir Sushi. How can you never have done a great designer episode on him? I don't know, but I haven't. I searched the pickup and delivery archives and I have no episodes named. You've Rosenberg and I have no episode, no great designer episodes about Ouvir Rosenberg. So it seems like it's time. So you've Rosenberg is a designer who came onto the scene. He's been designing games for more than or around 20 years now. He really came onto the scene and made a big splash in the mid 2000 with a couple different games, but, uh, he's best known for two different types of games now. He sort of made his reputation making games with Polyominoes in them, or he made his reputation making worker placement games. And then for a while he made a lot of games with Polyominoes in them. In the meantime, he he's also made a number of other different games. And so I thought I would approach talking about what I like about his design style from three perspectives from the worker placement farm angle, where you have a, where the game is a worker placement game and you have a big farm plot. And part of what you're trying to do is manage that farm plot. The second angle or conversation that I wanted to think about or group of games are his polyomino games. Games where you are placing polyomino tiles. The third group are the other games, games that do some other thing. sometimes there, and I will say there are worker placement games in all three categories today, but that's the way I'm shaping them. So start with worker placement. When people are talking about how worker placement works and what it does. The epitome of that genre that people point to most is Agricola. Agricola is a 2007 game from Ouvir Rosenberg, in which you play a medieval farmer in like Germany or the German area anyway, and you are a subsistence farmer. You are trying to raise enough crops to live on and hopefully prosper. At the beginning you have a two room house and a spouse and a plot of land that you can farm, and that's pretty much it. Like you have nothing, nothing in that area you start with for food as well. Maybe that was the wedding gift from your parents or something. So it gets you started, but it doesn't get you very far. Over the course of I think, 15 rounds, you use your workers to activate actions and use those actions to try to find efficiencies as you go. The thing that makes Agricola really interesting is that there are these occupation cards and these minor improvement cards that you get, and when you're playing with experienced players, you draft them back and forth, and then your goal is to sort of make a plan to gain efficiency using these specific cards that let you really tailor your skills and experience to maximize the points that you're going to earn as you go. This game was revelatory for a lot of people for a number of reasons. The part of it is the intensity of its limitations. In the past, Richard Hamre refers to this as the Rosenberg Shackles games, where you are hemmed in by an intensity of the economic limitations. I will say over time, Rosenberg has gotten less intense about those shackles that he. We've seen a variety of different people, a variety of different games come out that changed or release reduced the number and ways that those limitations were imposed. Most notably, Caverna is another worker placement game, and in that one it's easier to feed your people. So feeding your people is a crucial part of these games and is sometimes very hard, but not always so. The games that I've played that fit in this genre are Agricola, Caverna. Although I've only played Caverna um online, I did play Agricola, All Creatures Great and Small once. I have played Nusfjord and I have Glass Road on here as well. Glass road is an interesting one because it is worker placement, but you're not growing things. Instead you're making things. And it's got a really interesting economy management system with this wheel. Now apparently he's come out with a new game called Black Forest. Black road is very similar in feel to Glass Road. It's still it has that same management wheel which is a real challenge, but the reason I put it in with the category of worker placement with plot is that you have this board where there's a bunch of spots that you put, things you build. And so like Agricola, like a nusfjord is the same way. Nusfjord has this board with a bunch of spots, and then you're going to put cards onto that board of buildings that you've built. So in each of these cases, you have a space to manage as well as the worker actions that you're doing. Now some games allow you to get more workers. Agricola that is one of the things you're often trying to do in the first third of the game is amplify the number of workers you have. So you take some number of turns to acquire wood and Reed, so you can build a second, a third room and get a third worker. You can get up to five workers eventually in Agricola. Different games allow that or don't. In Nusfjord, for example, you never have more than the three workers that you get at the beginning of the game, as far as I know. Uh, and I believe that's the same for Glass Road. But in any case, these games are really interesting because they have varied. They have relatively limited sets of things you can do with the workers, but then they always have varied possibilities through either cards or variable tiles or something like that. So in Nusfjord and in Glass Road, it's which buildings are available in Agricola, it's which occupations are available in this fjord. It's also the elders, the he's got these different sets of elders that can become available. And those change how you play the game in all of these. One of the hallmarks is that some turns you're going to take, are you going to take have a very minor feel to them? A lot of them do, in fact. But it's about subtle eking out of economic advantage as you go along to increase the likelihood that you're going to have a good score at the end. So you're creeping, creeping, grasping at efficiency toward big scores. What makes them interesting, one next to the other are the different ways that he pursues that, the different sorts of mechanisms that leave you there. And frankly, the different themes, like I find nusfjord interesting in comparison to Agricola, because in one of them I'm farming and one of them I'm fishing. It's kind of a silly distinction, but I don't mind it. Um, and I think that that makes for interesting play. I will say the more of them I play, the less I feel like I need to own all of them. For example, the new Black Forest came out. I don't feel like I need to get that. In fact, I sold Glass Road because I played it a couple times. I thought it was really interesting, but I'm like, I have Agricola. Like, if I feel like an oof Rosenberg worker placement game, I have Agricola, I have no, I don't I don't need to have all of them. So right now, the three of this type of game that I have are Agricola, Caverna cave versus cave, which I have not actually played, and Nusfjord. All right. The second game type that I wanted to talk about here that I really enjoy are Rosenberg's Polyomino games, and he's introduced a number of them across a range. It's sort of like he said, okay, I'm going to spend a decade making games with Polyominoes in them. And that's what he did. The outcome of that are two games in particular that I think are very, very good and a couple that are really fun. The two that are very, very good on the very light end is patchwork. Patchwork is very stripped down. Polyomino placement game. You're drafting polyominoes, you're placing them on your board. You're trying to fill up your board. The polyominoes have income on them. As you play, you get income. It's very straightforward, really smart, really fun game for two players. On the other hand, he has a feast for Odin, which brings in the worker placement stuff that he had before. It removes the variable placement spaces by instead just giving you a ton of placement spaces, and then adds in on top of it the polyominoes aspect to it, where you're putting out polyomino tiles. So it's the combination of those two sets of things. That makes for really interesting play in both of these cases. The polyomino element. Oh, and then there are a number of other polyomino games that have come out. I have played Cottage Garden, for example, but there's also Indian Summer and Spring Meadow. I can't think of any other. Oh, and then I also have New York Zoo, which I really like, which is another polyomino game. And all in all of these, you have multiple kinds of ways that you're managing how the polyominoes move in A feast for Odin. The Polyominoes are also your goods, and you can upgrade the goods from one one form to another as long as you haven't put them in your grid yet. But your grid is what creates income for you. It represents the wealth and stability of your society. So the earlier you put things into your grid, the earlier those help you gain different benefits, but you also can't upgrade them anymore once they're in your grid. So there's this interesting back and forth balance to it that works really well. Now I have purchased the Norwegian's expansion, but I haven't played it and that seems like a blunder on my part. Something to be fixed, but I haven't gotten around to that, as is often the case with games I have. So what makes, uh, what makes the Polyomino stuff interesting? One is, I think you've Rosenberg was really one of the first people to do it. There are other games that use Polyominoes. The ones, the ones that really stick out in my mind are the Isle of Cats and the Phil Walker. Harding games like Baron Park and Llama Land. Both of those came out after patchwork, I believe, although Baron Park would be a closer, closer run thing. I also have a Limerick, which is, um, is it Limerick? It's one of the counties in Ireland. I don't think it's Limerick actually, but so I have that one. And that is not either Phil Walker, Harding or UV Rosenberg might be Rudiger Dorn. I don't think that's right. But regardless. So uh, as far as I know, you've. Rosenberg really brought the Polyomino game into the forefront. And he thought through what kinds of different shapes are interesting to play with? What kinds of varieties and numbers do you want? And he really captured this idea that it is fun to find a combination of tiles that fit together well on your board. I really like the nuance of those connections and the way that they play out. Now, these, uh, these kinds of games we saw replicate themselves across a variety of different fields. There are roll and write games like or flip and write games like, uh, cartographers and our own Titania Ascending, which is still in production. Hell, there are uh, Rosenberg himself created Patchwork Doodle, which is a drawing version of patchwork. And Frank West came out with a writing version of the Isle of Cats. Uh, Isle of Cats flip and draw. So all of these games resulted in really interesting shifts to how you think about acquiring things and collecting things on the board. I think that the challenge of trying to manage what kind of polyominoes are going to end up in your board is one that people latched onto and became really fun, such to the point that now polyomino tiling is a thing that people regularly talk about. I will take one more moment to talk about New York Zoo. New York Zoo is really interesting because it has this sort of overflow economic model that's really interesting. You have all these little zoo animals, and as you fill up the enclosures you have, you get to spread those animals out to more spaces. And the the way that they populate is really interesting. And you're kind of doing a balance between trying to fill up your zoo and trying to grow enough animals that you can then fill up your zoo faster. Part of what's interesting about New York Zoo is that the smaller enclosures you have, the faster you get to move in terms of multiplying and expanding, and the faster you move, the quicker you will get to finish your board, which is how you win. I'm walking by one of our local bakeries, and it looks like the baker came out side with a tray of rolls so he could take pictures of them in the sun with his phone. So that's that's the kind of thing you see here when you're walking around talking about board games. All right. So the third category of game I want to talk about today with regard to Rosenberg are what I call his other games. So he has produced a bunch of other games that don't easily fit into the category of either worker placement with farm plot or polyomino tile placement. So to start with, I have a card game Bonanza. Wildly, Bonanza is one of Rosenberg's most popular games, and it is very idiosyncratic in Bonanza. You are growing beans and you can only grow a certain number or certain different kinds of beans in your bean field. And so what you're trying to do is find the right combination of crops to grow in your bean field. It's real weird, but it's a fun idea. And I think it works really well. Um, and it's a really fun game. One of the tricks twists is that you can't rearrange your hand. Something they borrowed for the very popular scout. Um, I don't know if Rosenberg's the first one to think of. You're not allowed to rearrange your hand as a card mechanism, but it's the first game that I played with that. But Bonanza is a lovely little, uh, negotiation card game with some really fun social interactions. Next up, in this sort of weird or different category, I would point to Fairy Trails, which is a path building game. We also have Nova Luna, which is a path building game with some scoring elements, which here's something I think is really interesting. So Nova Luna he Rosenberg played habitats and he thought habitats was interesting, but he wanted to just experiment with the scoring piece of habitats. And so he made a game using the scoring mechanism from habitats. And then he called the designer of habitats and offered him a co-designed credit on Nova Luna, because they were so close, the because Rosenberg had borrowed this mechanism and he's like, you know, this is your mechanism that I'm that I experimented with. So I want you to have equal credit with me on the design, which I think is really nice and fits the kind of spirit we would like to see the boardgame community have, but it has to do with placing tiles that have scoring conditions on them. And then when you have the right number of scoring conditions, you score the tile. He used this again in a little bit different way in this game, Applejack, which is this weird fruit picking game where you are placing tiles and moving around the apple orchard, picking different kinds of apples, and you get points based on how many of the same kind of apple are next to each other. It's really interesting. It would be a fun game to play in person sometime. I've only played it online and playing it online. You lose a little bit of the flavor and the feel, but it's pretty interesting. And then I would point to two slightly bigger games. We have Reykholt, which at some point I heard was a reimplementation of the mechanism from At the Gates of Loyang. But in both cases, you are trying to raise crops in a way that allows you to sell them at the market, but you have to sell them in a specific way and a specific order. So you're trying to raise crops enough to make your way around the market. Um, Le Havre is the other game I wanted to point to here. This one maybe should be in worker placement. It is very similar to Nusfjord, uh, but is a little bit different. It does not have the plot. You do buy buildings that are cards and but it is much more about creating and transforming goods into other goods and that experience. What you're doing in Le Havre is so different than the experience in most of the other. You've Rosenberg games that I feel like it can be its own thing. So each of these has some cool thing that they do that feels a little bit different than most of his other games, and these games are actually part of what makes me think of Rosenberg is a really incredible designer, where certainly like the pedigree of any of the other two categories, either just the worker placement games or just the Polyomino tile placement games would be enough to put somebody in the category of like a designer to keep an eye on. But the fact that he has both of those, plus all these other games with these weird mechanisms or different ways of approaching the question of managing and collecting economic stuff, really puts him in a category above, above everybody else. I don't know where to end here. Rosenberg is an incredible designer, somebody whose games always get a look from me, and most of the time would get a play from me if they're available. I don't buy all of them, in part because they are. He does iterate in ways that feel a little Sammy, but there's often interesting nuance there that makes them really fun to play, even if you just get to try them a couple times. And sometimes you'll find one that that hits for you and you play it dozens of times. So that is my Greek Designer episode about Oov Rosenberg, my third most populated game designer in terms of games I own that they designed. Again, I have Agricola, Caverna, Nusfjord, patchwork, A feast for Odin, New York Zoo, Bonanza, Reykholt, and Le Havre. I had Glass Road, but I sold it and I had Cottage garden, but I sold it. Well, thank you for joining me on my walk today. I'd love to hear. What are your favorite oeuvre? Rosenberg games. You can tell me by going over to Board Game Geek and sharing that on our pickup and delivery forum, or the Guild Conversation space, which is at boardgamegeek.com I-269 Guild number 3269, that memorable set of numbers. If you'd like to reach out to me directly, the easiest way is through BoardGameGeek. Wombat 929 is my username there. I also have an email address. Brendan at Gamescom is the place to talk to me about that. So thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Buh bye. Brought to you by Rattlebox Games.