Uwe Rosenberg

You bought A Feast for Odin because it’s one of the highest-rated games on BoardGameGeek, because you love Vikings, because you love Uwe Rosenberg, or because someone told you it’s the ultimate worker placement game. Maybe all four. And then you opened the box. Hundreds of tiles. A player board covered in negative points. An action board with sixty-one action spaces spread across thirteen columns. Weapon cards. Occupation cards. Island boards. Mountain strips. A feeding phase. An income phase. Something called a “Thing Square.” ...

Your first game of Agricola probably went something like this: you stared at a hand of seven occupation cards you didn’t understand, spent six rounds desperately collecting wood while your opponents built fences, forgot to plan for the first harvest, took two begging cards worth negative six points, and finished with a score that made you wonder why anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to this. You’re not alone. Agricola has earned its nickname - Misery Farm - for a reason. But there’s an equally strong consensus among the hobby’s most experienced players: this is one of the greatest board games ever made, and it only reveals itself after you stop drowning. ...

There’s something deeply ironic about Uwe Rosenberg’s career. He’s one of the most prolific and celebrated designers in the history of board gaming - with multiple titles in BGG’s top 100 and a catalogue spanning nearly 30 years - yet if you described his games to someone unfamiliar with the hobby, they’d think you were joking. “So you… plant beans? And argue about bean futures? And that’s fun?” Yes. Yes it is. And the fact that Rosenberg made it fun is precisely the point. ...

Uwe Rosenberg has a name-recognition problem - and it’s the exact opposite of what you’d expect. Everyone knows Agricola. Everyone’s heard of Caverna and A Feast for Odin. His big, sprawling, feed-your-family-or-suffer epics dominate “best euro” lists and BGG rankings. But hiding in their enormous shadows is a game that does almost everything better in half the time and a fraction of the table space. That game is Nusfjord, and it might be the single most underappreciated worker placement game of the last decade. ...