<PERSON>'s games have a familiarity to them, most likely because he is a prolific and influential designer who cultivates and brings to market games steeped in agriculture, growth, and efficiency. Players are expected to make tactical connections, invest limited resources, convert myriad goods, and place various tiles, all in the pursuit of a ripe harvest and satisfyingly tangible development. Rosenberg has become known for games with a large footprint (A Feast for Odin, Fields of Arle, Caverna). His games showcase hundreds of little resource tokens (Le Havre, Ora & Labora, and, again, A Feast for Odin). While he has made a splash with lighter polyomino games, his entries have generally been considered involved, tight, and sprawling.
So then he comes along with Nusfjord. Fewer tiles, fewer resources, fewer worker options, fewer rounds, and a smaller footprint. Twenty minutes per player? It seems as if old Uwe might be turning his back on players that love his expansive and robust creations. Where is the juggling of resources? Where are all of the goodies that will fill up my player board? What can be done with 21 total actions?
Take a closer look, though, and you see that he has done something many designers have difficulty with. He has cut fat tremendously. I think his design philosophy for this game was "take every expected aspect of my games and whittle them down to their most basic." Rosenberg has embraced minimalism with Nusfjord.
What is Nusfjord? It turns out that it is a delightful game that sees players running fishing companies in a Norwegian village, welcoming skilled elders to their fold, building ships for larger hauls, managing forests to acquire wood, and constructing special buildings on their land. There is also a small amount of shareholding that keeps income interesting and offers another simple consideration to the game.
Almost every decision comes down to weighing a need for fish, wood, gold, or points. Fish are useful because they are necessary for utilizing elders, building certain structures and ships, and filling up the "serving table" that activates the elders (gaining gold in the process). Wood is simply used to build stuff. Gold is also used to build things, but it is worth points at the end of the game and can buy shares (which will earn more fish). Points can be gained through buying and selling shares, building structures and ships, covering open spaces on player boards, and acquiring gold.
That's almost everything that a player can focus on in the game. It really isn't an incredibly long list, but you may have noticed that there is a lot of interactivity among the resources. Most times you need a combination of goods to build something. Oftentimes you'll need fish to gain quick cash, but you may also need gold to gain more fish. 579
You'll need forests to gather wood, but you'll need to clear out those forests to gain space for buildings. With every other action, players are weighing pros and cons, as most aspects of the game have a push-pull feeling that must be worked efficiently to get the greatest effect.
One of the most interesting elements of the game is how important fish are. This becomes very clear when you talk about the aptly named "Fishing Phase." Here's how the fishing phase goes. You check your current haul of fish. Maybe you've built a couple of ships, so you're bringing in 7 of the little swimmers. The first thing you must do is pay your friendly elders who have done so much (or little) for you. Let's say you have two elders at this point in the game, so that's 1 fish each. You're down to 5 fish. Now you must pay issued shares. You've issued 1 share: that's a fish paid out to another player. Now you're down to 4 fish. You distribute to any of the shares of your company that you own. You only have the two shares you started with: that's 2 fish. Those will go from your shares and into your Supply, to be used by you for whatever you want. So, now you're down to 2 left to dish out. They go to your Reserve (unless you're already at the limit of 8 fish in there, in which case they go bye-bye). You don't have access to your Reserve unless you take an action to transfer it to your Supply, so they'll just sit there until you do something about it. In the end, out of the 7 fish you hauled, you ended up with 2 you can immediately work with. Thankfully you had those two starting shares!
This little illustration shows the importance of a whole number of things - the size of your haul, the amount of elders you have, the amount of shares you've sold, the amount of shares you possess, and whether you're relying on your reserve or not. 629