I got to take Nusfjord on holidays this July and play nothing else for two weeks. Most people are probably familiar with the game and Uwe games in general, so I'll dispense with explaining the rules and instead try to explain how it plays/feels and compares to other games. 



The heart of the game is the building market. Buying buildings is the key to doing well, either because they act as engine builders that set you up for future turns, or because they provide huge numbers of points if certain conditions are met. You also need to buy basic buildings to free up space in the market to add more powerful buildings in later turns. Each building has a significantly different effect that synergizes with a resource (fish, timber, elders...), so the initial market setup and your choice of buildings will influence your overall strategy.



Let me emphasize: the variety in Nusfjord is huge and delightful. Each deck has 44 building cards. In a typical game, you'll see around half of them, randomly chosen. The big box comes with 7 decks, and you can also mix-and-match decks, so you can do the math on how many combinations there are to be seen. This creates a curious sensation, because while the basic actions are fairly repetitive and simple (harvest timber, hire elders, build a ship etc.), their importance and the way you use them can be transformed by the buildings in your village. I've done well by having a ton of ships and no ships, many buildings and many forests, lots of gold and no gold… you get the picture. Some of the best games I've played featured cards that turned the rules of the game on their head: you get points for not taking actions that are typically beneficial, you can place buildings in your harbour instead of ships, you can steal fish from the plates used to feed elders. It gets really creative.



Meeting those scoring conditions is where it becomes tricky, because you're very limited: there are a few more than 11 possible actions depending on how you count, but you only have 3 workers. Not only that, your previous turns' workers block you on the current turn. If you play the advanced variant, your workers from the two previous turns block you. It can be very, very tough to do what you want and you can easily cut yourself off from performing the actions you need if you're not careful.



This fact is a good segue to how the game feels: it's tense. I just don't agree with people who say Nusfjord is chill and meditative and cozy. No, Nusfjord is a struggle to anticipate how you're going to buy those two buildings you desperately want three turns from now even though you can't get enough goddamn fish in your supply to feed your elders and there's no more forests left to chop down for wood. On the one hand, the rules and flow are so simple that you could knock out a game in fifteen minutes. Even when playing poorly, you rarely score fewer than 25 points. On the other, every action counts and it can feel so difficult to build the right combos. In board game parlance, it's "thinky." I could sometimes happily spend 5 or 10 minutes a turn turning different possibilities over in my mind. It's hard to score over 40 points, but when you do, it feels extremely satisfying.



Speaking of which, the difficulty you play on changes the feel a lot. On normal solo difficulty, you can try to be more ambitious. You can also play looser, as the margin for error is greater. Oops, you messed up and need 2 more gold to buy an essential ship. That's OK, because the sell a share action just became available again. Advanced difficulty is mercilessly tight. You can rarely perform any action more than twice before the game is over. Often, it feels like you perform actions only because no other actions are available. Planning ahead becomes more important. The challenge was stimulating, but I think I had less fun with this variant. My favourite way to play is the 3-game campaign; the game gets tougher over time as you thin out the building deck and can no longer reuse those buildings you already built in previous games.



Nusfjord doesn’t build to a big climax with a huge end-game turn like many other euros. With only 7 short turns, you blink and the game is over. Instead, the tension and challenge are evenly spread out across the game. At every stage, you’re trying to solve for the problem in front of you. If you don’t manage your resources smartly, you quickly end up broke and helpless, forced to take low-value actions just to build up some economy. I love how Uwe designed the interactions between resources, where A is needed to get B, but first you need to perform C, but this can give you negative points, however it also allows you to do D… everything feels so well thought out and interconnected. The fact that I didn’t find any game-breaking cards despite how many there are is a testament to the robustness of the system.



Of all the other solo games I’ve played, it feels most similar to Gaia Project. There are obviously differences: length, the self-blocking, the surprise that Nusfjord reserves for you on turns 4 and 6 when the powerful C buildings are revealed and you’re forced to adapt mid-course. But make no mistake, it’s a tight strategy game at its core.



If there’s anything cozy about the game, it's the aesthetic. The rustic art style and the deep blues, greens, and browns of Nusfjord's rural setting really gew on me. I happened to be staying in a farmhouse not far from the sea while I played and the game's style lovingly evoked the region's half-timbered architecture, the nearby forests, the boats on the water. Before buying, I found the style a bit "rough," especially the text-heavy cards, but it's pleasant when it's on the table.



A last testament to the game's infinite variability is that I haven't even tried the Besokende variant, with guest workers that change the rules and scoring in even more new ways, and I feel in no rush to do so. It's really enjoyable to have a fresh puzzle to solve every time you set up, without having to learn anything new. I hope it's fairly clear that I'm a fan. The only thing missing, for my taste, is that eurogame rush of ramping up in wealth and power and building towards an epic conclusion. Nusfjord stays on an even keel throughout.

Nusfjord is my first Uwe, and an unexpected treat