Fishing in Norway
🐟Nusfjord is among the most mentioned Uwe Rosenberg euros - at least I’ve heard about it a lot in solo gamer groups. Unfortunately it was mostly out of print and hard to get lately, but now the Nusfjord Big Box edition is finally here! 😯 The game is deceptively simple - you get the usual Rosenberg euro experience, but there are only 3 types of resources and games go by fast. It’s all pretty streamlined.
🧐The seven rounds of the game consist of a passive fishing phase, where you get fish according to your fleet size, which then get automatically allocated to specific places. So you won’t just flat out get every fish, and interestingly if you stockpile too much the excess goes back to the supply.
Then you have worker placement with 3 workers, followed by a cleanup phase to end the round. Worker placement is fairly standard: blocking spaces and immediately getting something.
The two main elements of the game are Elders 🧓 and Buildings 🏠. Elders give you access to new abilities but require fish to use and as upkeep. Buildings have myriads of effects, your goal is basically to find synergistic combinations to score well - you are also managing spaces on your board, growing and chopping forests to earn ever-important wood.
A big strength of the game is its 7 decks of building cards. They bring huge variety as you won’t go through a deck in a single game! (One of these decks introduces Guests, a special resource, which is a new expansion made for this big box. 👍) My biggest problem is that every effect is written out in a 3-4 line text. So you keep having to scan through the cards for something that is useful to you.
The solo mode is just beat-your-own-high-score with a simple twist. You play with 2 sets of workers and you always block yourself with the previous set. There is also a mini “campaign” mode where you play 3 times back-to-back trying to score 100 points, taking out buildings you have built previously so you have to keep changing your strategy.
Nusfjord is a Rosenberg game through and through. If you like his euros, most probably you will like this one - and you can finally find it available in stores. 🙌☺️
