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Uwe Rosenberg (born 27 March 1970) is a German game designer and the co-founder of Lookout Games. He initially became known for his card game Bohnanza , which was successful both in Germany and internationally. He is more recently known for developing many highly-acclaimed strategy games, such as Agricola and A Feast for Odin . As of March 2023, his games held six of the entries on BoardGameGeek.com's top-100 board games of all time.
Born in Aurich, Germany, Rosenberg first began to occupy himself with the development and mechanisms of games at the age of 12. [1] He published a number of play-by-mail games during his school years. While he was still in college, Amigo published his first major success, Bohnanza. Since finishing his statistics studies in Dortmund (the subject of his thesis was "Probability distributions in Memory"), his main occupation is the development of games.
In 2000, he and a few other game designers founded the publishing company Lookout Games. It published a number of expansions to Bohnanza, partly in cooperation with Hanno Girke. Larger projects were at first published at other publishers, such as Amigo and Kosmos. [2]
Since 2005, Rosenberg has concentrated mostly on complex economic strategy games, [3] often with a farming or fishing theme: his first, Agricola, was released in October 2007, went on to win a Spiel des Jahres special award for the best complex game of 2008, [4] and has become a staple in the European game subgenre of worker placement games. It dethroned Puerto Rico as the highest rated game on BoardGameGeek.com in September 2008 and stayed at the top of the rankings until March 2010. [4] A second game in this series, Le Havre , was published in October 2008, as well as Caverna in 2013. [4] [5] His highest rated game is currently A Feast for Odin , which is ranked #23 on BoardGameGeek.com as of March 2023. [6]
Since 2014, he has also designed several less-complex tile-laying games, including Patchwork .
Many of Rosenberg's designs have also been recognized as being excellent for solitary play. [7]
He married Susanne Balders on 18 May 2007. He lives in Gütersloh and works at his studio in Dortmund.
A Eurogame, also called a German-style board game, German game, or Euro-style game, is a class of tabletop games that generally has indirect player interaction and multiple ways to score points. Eurogames are sometimes contrasted with American-style board games, which generally involve more luck, conflict, and drama. They are usually less abstract than chess or Go, but more abstract than wargames. Likewise, they generally require more thought and planning than party games such as Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit.
The Spiel des Jahres is an award for board and card games, created in 1978 with the purpose of rewarding family-friendly game design, and promoting excellent games in the German market. It is thought that the existence and popularity of the award was one of the major drivers of the quality of games coming out of Germany, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. A Spiel des Jahres nomination can increase the typical sales of a game from 500–3,000 copies to around 10,000, and the winner can usually expect to sell as many as 500,000 copies.
Bohnanza is a German-style card game based on the game mechanics of trading and politics, designed by Uwe Rosenberg and released in 1997 by Amigo Spiele and by Rio Grande Games. It is played with a deck of cards with comical illustrations of eleven different types of beans of varying scarcity, which the players are trying to plant and sell in order to earn money. The principal restriction is that players may only farm two or three types of beans at once, but they obtain beans of all different types randomly from the deck and so must engage in trade with the other players to be successful.
Mayfair Games was an American publisher of board, card, and roleplaying games that also licensed Euro-style board games to publish them in English. The company licensed worldwide English-language publishing rights to The Settlers of Catan series between 1996 and 2016.
The Deutscher Spielepreis is an important award for boardgames. It was started in 1990 by the German magazine Die Pöppel-Revue, which collects votes from the industry's stores, magazines, professionals and game clubs. The results are announced every October at the Spiel game fair in Essen, Germany. The Essen Feather is awarded at the same ceremony.
BoardGameGeek (BGG) is an online forum for board gaming hobbyists and a game database that holds reviews, images and videos for over 125,600 different tabletop games, including European-style board games, wargames, and card games. In addition to the game database, the site allows users to rate games on a 1–10 scale and publishes a ranked list of board games.
Klaus-Jürgen Wrede is a German board game creator, the creator of the best-selling Carcassonne and Downfall of Pompeii.
Thomas J. Vasel is a podcaster, designer and reviewer of board games, and hosted The Dice Tower podcast from 2003-2022, which has more than 300,000 subscribers. Vasel began publishing board game reviews in 2002 on BoardGameGeek, followed by YouTube, and his Dice Tower website. As of 2021, he has rated over 7000 games and expansions. His first board game review was for The Settlers of Canaan.
Agricola is a Euro-style board game created by Uwe Rosenberg. It is a worker placement game with a focus on resource management. In Agricola, players are farmers who sow, plow the fields, collect wood, build stables, buy animals, expand their farms and feed their families. After 14 rounds players calculate their score based on the size and prosperity of the household.
Le Havre is a board game about the development of the town of Le Havre. It was inspired by the games Caylus and Agricola and was developed in December 2007.
Race for the Galaxy is a card game designed by Thomas Lehmann. It was released in 2007 by Rio Grande Games. Its theme is to build galactic civilizations via game cards that represent worlds or technical and social developments. It accommodates two to four players by default although expansions allow for up to six players, as well as solo play. The game uses iconography in place of language in some places, with complex powers also having a text description. While appreciated by experienced players for being concise, some new players find the icons difficult to learn and to decipher.
Lookout Games is a German board and card game publisher. The company published, among other games, the board game Agricola, which was honored with the Complex Game award by the German Game of the Year jury in 2008.
Star Wars: X-Wing is a miniature war game designed by Jay Little and produced by Fantasy Flight Games that was released at Gen Con during August 17, 2012. It features tactical ship-to-ship dogfighting between various types of starfighters set in the fictional Star Wars universe. The game is said to be easy to learn and quick to play taking anywhere between 15 and 60 minutes from first set-up to battle's end. Each round both players give all their ships movement orders without knowing what their opponent is doing before resolving these orders while trying to shoot down enemy craft. On May 1, 2018, FFG announced X-Wing Second Edition, to be released on September 13, 2018. Although the physical models are transferable, an entire new set of rules, templates, and markers have been produced and are available through a new core set, waves, and conversion packs.
Blue Orange is a French board game company based in Pont-à-Mousson, France. Often called Blue Orange international or Blue Orange Europe and mistaken for Blue Orange Games.
Nusfjord is a fishing village in Flakstad Municipality in Lofoten in Nordland county, Norway. The village lies on the southern shore of the island of Flakstadøya, along the Vestfjorden.
Bärenpark is a multiplayer board game designed by game designer Phil Walker-Harding and was first published in 2017 by Lookout Games. Each player collects and places layers of tiles to plan the map for their individual bear park, a type of zoo common in certain parts of the world, such as the Bärengraben in Bern.
A Feast for Odin is a Euro-style game created by Uwe Rosenberg. It is a worker placement game focused on placement of irregular cardboard polyominoes into boards owned by each player. The polyominoes are between 2 and 12 square units large, with art depicting various Viking-themed items such as beans, milk, flax, and linen. The full game is 7 rounds long, with an option for a shorter 6-round game. The rounds increase in length; the number of workers each player may use goes up by 1 each round. The game includes a 20-page historificating almanac written by Gernot Köpke.
Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001–? is a board game for one or two players, published by GMT Games in 2010.
Caverna: The Cave Farmers is a 2013 board game designed by Uwe Rosenberg. It is a complex worker placement strategy game that shares similarities in gameplay and theme with his earlier board game, Agricola, The game's theme revolves around helping a small dwarf family to settle a cave and nearby woodlands and to develop the setting through furnishing caves as well as converting forests into meadows, fields and pastures. Caverna received positive reviews from critics, two major expansions have also been released for the game.
Patchwork is a two-player board game created by Uwe Rosenberg. It was released in 2014.
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