Nusfjord

In Nusfjord your run a small fishing company in the coastal town of Nusfjord, Norway. Over the course of seven rounds, you expand and develop your company as best you can.

Everyone begins with their own personal player board and three ‘workers’ in the form of wooden discs. Every round follows three phases – fishing, actions and returning home. In the fishing phase, everyone collects fish – how many you collect depends on how many boats you’ve built, so this may vary from player to player as the game proceeds – and distributes it. To best explain distribution though, we need to jump forward to the action phase first.

In the action phase everyone takes turns placing a worker on the central board and completing the action there. The actions allow you to collect gold, gather wood, build boats (to improve your catch each round) or buildings (for in-game benefits, and/or end-game points) or recruit Elders to your table. An elder represents a person who has specialist knowledge you can bring to your table, both literally and figuratively: a recruited elder stays with you for the rest of the game, giving you an action space unavailable to other players, but costing you some of your fish each round for the privilege of having them. But elders can only be recruited when there is fish at the table for them (part of the shared board) so another option is to bring your fish to the table in return for gold – and gold is very helpful for constructing buildings!

Finally each player’s company begins with two shares under their own ownership, and three unissued. You can issue shares during the game (that’s another action) for gold and buy issued shares (ditto!) costing gold, but there’s a risk other players may nab your issued shares before you have a chance to do so yourself… which brings us back to how fish get distributed: one to any elders you have, then one to any opponents who own a share in your company, then finally as many to your supply as you have shares yourself, before dumping whatever remains into your reserve. Your reserve, then, can accrue a lot of stuff, but it’s all inaccessible unless you move it to your personal supply, which costs you… yes, an action!

At the end of each round your workers return home, and in certain rounds more buildings are added to the available display. The most rewarding buildings of all come initially into your hand, so you have a couple of rounds to build them before they must be added to the communal area. After seven rounds, points are tallied for buildings, ships and shares, and deducted for any un-issued shares or spaces on your player board.