Fresco - The Renaissance of Euro-Gaming

The short of it:

Challenging, competitive, simple, and fun. Overall – one of my favorite new games.

The Good:

Simple to learn, hard to master. Three 'expansions' included in the box to add more re-playability and challenge. High quality board.

The Bad:

The rules could be a little clearer, but hardly a deal breaker.

The Ugly:

I..uh..the box is heavy?

The Gameplay:

Just for clarity sake, this covers only the base set. The expansions build on the base set rules by adding additional rules, challenges, and options.

The game is broken up into various phases. The first phase is the “wake up” time. Starting with the player is last place up to the player in first place, each player chooses a time for their workers to wake up. Waking up earlier gets that player first chance at the market, and the cathedral but it makes the workers unhappy. Let them sleep in, and they'll be happy but late to the market and painting. If they get too unhappy, one of your worker quits. Happy enough, and an extra worker shows up.

After picking times, each player secretly chooses how to allocate their workers for the day. Each worker can do one of the following actions:

Visit the market
Paint the cathedral
Paint portraits
Mix paints
Visit the theater

After picking actions and revealing, each player goes in order of the wake up time.

Visit the Market:

There are two options. The first is to buy paint from one market booth. For every worker they have, they can buy one paint from a single booth. Three workers, three paints, one booth. After the purchasing is complete, that booth is closed.

The other option is to close the booth. This costs no money, but it does prevent another player from buying the paints.

Paint the Cathedral:

There are two options here – one is to paint the ceiling of the cathedral. Pay the paint cost, get the tile, earn points. If the bishop is next to you while you paint, you get bonus points. If the bishop is on the tile you paint, you get even more bonus points. The bishop isn't where you want? Bribe him. He'll move cardinally if you bribe him. And after you paint, he'll come inspect your work. Chain your paintings together and you can get a lot of bonus points.

Optionally, you can paint the alter. Unlike the ceiling, all you need is the primary colours. If you have any of the secondary colours, you can earn yourself some bonus points if you use them as a substitution.

Paint Portraits:

Simple – earn three coins for every portrait you paint. Money is good.

Mix Paints:

For every worker you dedicate here, you can mix two sets of primary colours into secondary colours. Very helpful if the market gets shut down, or for the paints they don't sell.

Visit the theater:

Second only to sleeping in, this is absolutely the best way to improve morale. It makes our workers happy.

At the end of the round, each player collections on coin for every piece of the cathedral they've painted.

Turns go round following this method until finally there is six or less tiles unpainted in the cathedral. At then, a final turn goes around. Two differences with the final round. First – the theater option is replaced by a 2nd chance to paint the cathedral, and secondly – you don't collect money at the end.

After the last round, all players get one victory point for every two coins they have.

This game is a hard one to explain, and easier to understand by playing it, but overall this has become one of my favorite games. Much like Puerto Rico or Agricola it has a good deal of strategy, but overall significantly less complex. It's easy, even on the first play through, to find the right balance of what to do and when.

This, overall, to me is the proper balance of skill, luck, resource management, and competitiveness. If you enjoy euro-gaming at all, it is worth giving it a shot. You might be surprised at how addictive it becomes.