Ora et Labora

You can tell I ran the subline through a google translate and I’m not ashamed to admit it, my school never offered me Latin as a subject on the basis of it being “a dead language”; little did they know that decades later I’d have had some mild use for it reviewing this reprint of a Rosenberg classic! Score 1-0 to me, teachers! Also, I STILL haven’t used Trigonometry! And you pushed that agenda pretty hard!

More importantly, Rosenberg, anyone who knows me knows I love Euro Games and I am a bit of a fanboy when it comes to many things by Uwe Rosenberg, and yet there I was last week staring at Ora Et Labora while browsing through Zatu Games…and I’d never heard of it…

Yes, these things happen, Fanboy doesn’t exclusively mean knowledgeable, and the theme was something unfamiliar to me in the Rosenberg wheelhouse – a game of building up a monastery through careful placement of dwellings that provide engine functions and chain points from connected settlements.

You have me intrigued! Let’s dive in.

What is it in a nutshell?

· Ora Et Labora, Latin for ‘Pray’ and ‘Work’ is a 1 – 4 player game that’s part worker placement, part resource management, but predominantly it’s an engine builder through building acquisition and building placement.

· Players have a board containing a few pre-printed buildings, some basic resources, and access to purchase new buildings through a general market that expands over time. All buildings come with terrain restrictions on their placement, and each generate your points. Periodically you’ll get rounds where you can place settlements, which not only bag you points on their own but collect bonus points from the nearby buildings adjacent to it.

· Resources are tracked via tiles as opposed to tokens like in many typical Rosenberg games, but that’s because you can acquire an abundance of them. Many resources are determined by the Resource wheel, a clock-like tracker that ticks to the next notch every round, increasing the number of resources you can acquire the longer it’s left alone; in other words: This round you may only collect 1 wood if you chop down trees, but if you wait a couple rounds you’ll actually collect 6 wood if you chop down trees…so long as no one else gets there before you; yes, this is a ‘communal’ resource wheel, and the threat of other players nabbing it up first is always a stress.

· You can purchase additional expansions to your land, containing shores, seas, or even hillsides and mountains, but these get more expensive as they’re used up.

· There’s an Irish and French variant containing different buildings and some unique resource types of each. There are also different game types for each of the multiplayer games, long or short, with the long games lasting up to 3 hours of gameplay.

· Acquire resources, build engines, expand your settlement, and most importantly be careful of where you position your buildings, as adjoining settlements can either make or break your bonus scores; to be honest, this could have been the nutshell, but hopefully this section hasn’t outstayed its welcome.

How does it play?

This is unlike any other Rosenberg game I’ve played. I deeply love the complexity of a Feast for Odin, and likewise the theme and playstyle of Hallertau. Overall, I’m a sucker for worker placement games…and Ora et Labora does have that…somewhat, but it’s quite a different game to those, and every time I talk about it, I love it a little bit more.

Enough with the vagueness, Ora Et Labora is masterfully created. You need to be thinking quite a fair way in advance until you become familiar with the types of buildings on offer, it’s all about creating engines that maximise your turns and bag you the resource to get more buildings, and those buildings ‘are’ the engines.

Buildings are always the same in every playthrough, you’ll start with a handful of basic buildings in the communal pool and then they’ll expand over a number of rounds with bigger and better buildings, and ‘those’ buildings might be heavily dependant on buildings from the prior pool-set; and even then you need to be careful where you position buildings on your board because you have to watch out for very specific rounds where you get to play settlements. Settlements are essentially the bonus points collectors, every building has base points and bonus points, and bonus points can only be acquired through settlements. Settlements collect the bonus points from buildings that are orthogonally adjacent to them, so you’ll really want to capitalise on those.

We played a 2-player game, and we found the flow to be really well placed, we enjoyed having certain phases (new buildings added to the pool, building settlements, etc) locked to specific rounds, it forced us to plan ahead, something I didn’t do very well for a while, and lost out on potential bonus points.

During your turns you have 2 actions, which can include buying buildings or placing one of your 3 workers onto a building to perform its action, but here’s where it gets interesting, your workers consist of 2 lay-brothers and Prior; if you construct a building and your Prior is available you may automatically assign them to your new building as a free action.

The game is very much about maximising efficiency and getting ahead with resources and buildings, all while staring at the resource wheel to see whether I should get the resource I desperately need to buy that one building or cash in on a resource that’s been building up since forever so as I don’t have to ‘potentially’ worry about it in the near future.

I’ve criticised Fields of Arle for being a game that lacks a lot of variation, and yet despite Ora Et Labora’s consistent pool of buildings that always arrive at the same time, and literally no randomness, Ora Et Labora overcomes those obstacles with ease to make every game seem fresh. The communal buildings forces players to rethink their strategy if the building they’ve been eyeing up is taken from them, and the communal resource wheel is a genius idea, you just never know whether players will leave a resource well enough alone to let you rake it in or whether you’re going to be struggling for wood because everyone’s after it.

How does it look?

This isn’t going to be a long section, Ore Et Labora has the “Rosenberg Charm” when it comes to simplistic art-styles that don’t go above and beyond what they need to convey. You’re looking at artwork similar to Agricola as opposed to Hallertau.

One of the complaints about the original version of this game was the player boards being hard card and the reference sheets being paper, but I’m pleased to say the reprint upgrades those to firm boards and hard card respectively. Everything is clear and concise, and as always there’s a reference manual for each building to clarify whatever you need, always welcome!

So how does it look? It looks great, it doesn’t try to be anything more than it needs to be, and what it is suits us just fine, you won’t be blown away, but you won’t be disappointed.

What’s awesome about the game?

It has to be the mechanics, hands down.

I love it when the gameplay is so tightly made that 1. It makes sense thematically, and 2. They’ve ‘thought of everything they needed to’, as an example: The Peat Coal Kiln is a building you can construct to turn your peat into peat coal, a more efficient fuel source for future purchases. While being worth 4 points on its own it has -2 bonus points if connected to a settlement, because what settlement wants a stinky peat kiln neighbouring it?

So what happens if someone spitefully purchases a building you desperately needed? Not a problem, you can pay your opponent in gold or alcohol to force ‘their’ workers to use their own building for ‘you’! Sounds busted right? Actually it isn’t, because in a 2-player short game we each got 2 actions per turn, and if during any player’s turn-start they have used up all of their workers then they return all workers back for re-deployment; why is that important?

Imagine if my partner used both of her actions to place both of her workers onto her buildings, leaving her with just 1 remaining worker, it’s now my turn, and I want to pay her to use one of her buildings, but if I do she’ll have used up her third worker and then get them all back at the start of her next turn. Do I increase her turn efficiency to use an ability on one of her buildings? Or do I forgo that actions and leave her with only 1 worker on her next turn? It seems that every corner of decision making is weighed up with tempo sacrifice, and that’s a big deal in this game! What seems busted on paper, yet makes you go “hmmmm, do I really want to do that?” during the game, is a fantastic translation of game mechanics.

I feel like this game will appeal to a lot of demographics who enjoy forward planning, or just love seeing ‘what happens’ when you expand plots of land and build this engine of buildings. Expect many instances of “Do you mind if I undo my turn?” and “ARGH! I wish I placed / bought / acquired / did things differently!”

What’s not so great about the game?

Not a great deal to put in this section.

I mean, I forced myself to use this ‘template’ for reviewing, but it doesn’t mean that I can’t say “I’ve got nothing chief.”

This is more of a personal thing, I struggled with the rules a bit, and even though I’m familiar with Rosenberg mechanics I got thrown by jumping back and forth between pages that showed the variances for long and short games for each player-count variety.

Expect to use YouTube as an aid here, but at least you’ve got a clean reference sheet to help.

What’s the verdict?

Thanks to Zatu for stocking this gem, we love it, and it currently sits in our top 3 Rosenberg games (we’ve yet to get onto Agricola, that should hopefully get fixed soon). Stick with the short games while you’re learning, and we can vouch that two players is competent enough to get a lot of millage from this.

If you’re in the market for something similar-ish-ish then you can consider Glass Road, which his a less intense experience with an alternative use for the resource wheel.

Ora Et Labora might take a while into gameplay before it eventually ‘clicks’, but once it does it should hopefully have you coming back for more! I highly recommend it.