review
thanks for the fish
Nusfjord
worker placement with zero female participation
Nusfjord is, or once was, that is, a small pretty fishing village on the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway; today, it has dwindled into a museum with very few inhabitants. No surprise there, you think after opening the box; there are – with the exception of us, the players - only 18 old men playing, the so-called Elders – and not one woman among them, not even one single old dame! That something like this is still possible in game design nowadays is a bit of surprise, especially since it should have been possible to design some of the functions and jobs assigned to those Elders as professions held by females. In Citadels, the extended new edition of Ohne Furcht und Adel, another approach was taken with a quota of 48% of females, holding such sympathetic role model jobs like diplomat, captain and master builder.
And the design of the other game components does not meet the expectations raised by the design of the box, either: The workers are represented by mere discs – as in ancient Agricola times, currently in its 10 years jubilee year – and the building cards feature only text and a rather insignificant range of symbols; some of the gold coins are too small and fiddly; everything else, at least, is good and really heavy, the box is filled with a lot of wooden game pieces and rather thick card board parts.
Each player starts with a small fishing vessel and three workers, who are – once again – used for worker placement; in fact, there are additional vessels available to increase the catch of fish, but the number of workers remains the same throughout the game. The first thing for us landlubbers to figure out – as a small puzzle before the start oft he game – which of three types of fish could be herring. There are three sets of cards with varying building cards, which are distinguished by their backsides of herrings, mackerels and cod, and fort he first game the rules recommend the use of the Herring deck. A glance into the rules appendix, as a last resort, will solve the puzzle; this rules appendix (a glossary and a list of all cards) is of exemplary layout and wording and features extensive explanations, among other things, of all the 150 cards in the game.
After the start of the game, but before worker placement, Ägir and Rán (the husbands of Nordic Ocean Gods) have decreed that a fish multiplication has to happen. Contrary to the fish multiplication in the Bible, in Nusfjord you often are left with approximately only half of the fresh fish you did previously catch. This redistribution of fish is not really intuitional and is purpose becomes clear only during the course of the game. Fish are, however, besides wood and gold, needed for the acquisition of always useful buildings, additional ships and also for the “feeding up” of the Elders who in their function are the equivalent of exclusive placement cases with distinct and varying consequences. When an Elder has had enough after three fishes, he – figuratively – has to throw up and lets us have one of those fish – which reminds me a bit of the upbringing of a penguin or pelican (the bird, not our game designer of the same name!)
Most of the rest, however, will probably be familiar to Rosenberg disciples; among the action options, one that needs to be mentioned is the option to be able to acquire wood not by the felling of forests alone; even a subsequent reforestation as well as a thinning out of existing forests – the environmentally sustainable version of forest economy, so to say – are possible as well. Furthermore, fishes must be summoned from your own „reserve case“, that is, a storage or “fish savings account”, which needs planning ahead and an additional action.
There is also an interesting solution for the sale of fishes tot he village pub, that is, the serving of fishes. On the one hand, you get victory points for it; and on the other hand, the Elders can only be pacified or made to function with those fishes – if not enough or no fish is delivered there, the function of the respective Elder cannot be used by anybody anymore. However, if I want to escape that dilemma and sell the fish necessary for later myself, they might be all gone again when it would be the turn of “my” Elder.
As is customary very often in this genre, any further interaction is rather indirect; the option to be able to acquire shares or stock of other players, however, comes across as rather artificially – the source of this mechanism in the game is rumored to come from the originally intended stock exchange game. The rewards constitute, on the one hand, a „fish dividend“ at the start of each round, and on the other hand, the putting on the market and acquisition of those shares are so lucrative for both sides that probably nobody will want to forego it. Connected to this, is, therefore, once again the familiar shortcoming of so many worker placement games: Most of the time, all players play parallel to each other. Of course, there is interaction coming from the snapping up of one of the eleven general placement cases – some if which, by the way, can be used multiple times in a round – but this is more often than not a random consequence of the way you play than a planned one. If you prefer worker placement games with lots of interaction, you should rather play Keyflower (WIN 448, February 2013) or Spyrium (WIN 462, February 2014).
In a game with four and five players, one or three placement cases are added, respectively, to „mirror“ or “imitate“ one of the eleven already previously used or blocked action cases to avoid conditions getting too tight. Nusfjord recommends itself especially well for a game with three players; for a game of two players, there is the graphically nice idea that the Banquet board of the village pub can be spread between the two opponents and the respective elders take a seat of both sides of the board, facing each other. In a solitaire game you alternate to play two colors, in the advanced version with three colors, and the workers in the colors of the currently inactive colors remain on the action board and thus block action cases.
„You can never get rid of Elders!“ is what you are told in the rules; this is correct, because a game of Nusfjord doesn’t take long enough for that and this is absolutely a good thing: Not a drawn-out epic duration, for once, but really only 20 crisp minutes per players, for a total of 21 actions in the seven rounds of the game, with only very little administrative bother. Furthermore, there are again – as is often the case in games by Uwe Rosenberg – a lot of distinct building cards on offer, so that there is more than enough variation for consecutive games.
Harald Schatzl
Players: 1-5
Age: 12+
Time: 60+
Designer:
Artist:
Price:
Publisher: Lookout Spiele 2017
Genre: Resources management, worker placement
Users: For families
Users: With friends
Special: 1 player
Special: 2 players
Version: de
Rules: de en pt ru
In-game text: yes
Comments:
Very good game for two
Best with three players
Exemplary rules and rules appendix
Rather short for the genre
Not much innovation
Components not as pretty as the box suggests
Compares to:
Other worker placement games by Uwe Rosenberg
Other editions:
Crowd Games (ru), Ludofy (pt), Mayfair (en)
My rating: 5
Harald Schatzl:
Nusfjord is a tactical development and optimization game, using worker placement as the main game mechanism. With guidance from experienced players, it is also suitable for casual players, even if some elements of the game are bit confusing to begin with. Components are plentiful, but rather Nordic/rough. All in all, not a heavyweight game wise, but offering quite a lot of interesting decision dilemmas on top of heavy and well-filled game box.
Chance (pink): 1
Tactic (turquoise): 3
Strategy (blue): 2
Creativity (dark blue): 0
Knowledge (yellow): 0
Memory (orange): 0
Communication (red): 1
Interaction (brown): 2
Dexterity (green): 0
Action (dark green): 0