Nemi is a small Italian town in the hills near Rome, overlooking a lake of the same name. It is best known for its wild strawberries and the Strawberry Festival, which has been held there since 1922. During the event, the streets fill with flowers, music, and market stalls, while women dressed in traditional costumes, known as Fragolare, hand out fruit to visitors.
This colorful festival became the theme of Nemi: The Strawberry Festival, a game designed by Valeria Cavasin and Edoardo Elbenstein and published by Fiammingo Games. As participants in the preparations, we will gather fruit and other ingredients, make strawberry desserts, and decorate the town. The player who contributes the most to the event’s success will receive the Golden Strawberry.
We received a pre-release copy of the game for testing. How did this sweet trip to sunny Italy turn out?
Gameplay
A game of Nemi: The Strawberry Festival lasts four rounds. The main board, featuring six recipes, progress tracks, and the scoring track, is placed in the center of the table. The harvest and supplier cards are divided into four numbered decks corresponding to the consecutive rounds. Each player receives a player board with two cutting boards for storing fruit, six apron tokens, and two flower tokens used to mark their score.
The first round consists only of the harvest and decoration phases. The preparation and cooking phases are added during the following three rounds.
During the preparation phase, players rotate their boards and discard the fruit from the cutting board that has moved to the bottom. The harvested produce has a limited shelf life, so it cannot be stored throughout the entire game. The harvest decks are also rebuilt, although each player keeps the card they selected most recently. Its number determines the turn order for the first choice of the upcoming round. The next deck of supplier cards is also introduced.
During the harvest phase, one card from each of the four decks is revealed. They depict crates containing different combinations of strawberries, wild strawberries, and blueberries. Supplier cards are then placed beneath them—one each beneath crates 1 and 2, two beneath crate 3, and three beneath crate 4.
Following the established turn order, players choose one of the available sets. They take the fruit shown on the harvest card and the supplier cards assigned to it. The harvest card itself is placed on top of the player’s pile and determines their position during the next iteration of the phase. The lower the crate’s number, the earlier they will be able to select again. However, lower-numbered crates come with fewer supplier cards, so taking the set that provides the best position in the turn order is not always the right decision.
The supplier cards include basic ingredients needed for cooking, such as milk, eggs, sugar, and recipe books. Players may also find objectives that provide points at the end of the game and cards with special actions. These can allow them to gain additional fruit, substitute a missing ingredient, or swap the positions of two cards on the board. Once everyone has made their choice, the unused sets are discarded and new ones are revealed. Harvesting continues until the current Supplier deck is depleted.
The players then move on to decorating the town. Each person secretly chooses at least one of their supplier cards and devotes it to this purpose. Once all the cards are revealed simultaneously, the values shown on their party flags are added together. The player with the highest total gains a number of points determined by the player count. However, every card used for decoration is discarded, regardless of who won.
Starting with the second round, harvested produce can be used for cooking. Each of the six desserts requires a specific combination of fruit and ingredient cards. After discarding them, the player advances their apron token on the selected recipe track. The same dish can be prepared multiple times, and everyone performs this phase simultaneously.
The game ends after the fourth round. Each dessert has a specific value, which is multiplied by the number of times it was prepared. Players then resolve their remaining cards that provide additional points, including those rewarding them for fulfilling clients’ orders, leading on recipe tracks, collecting the most Fragolara cards, or having fruit left on their player boards. The player with the highest score wins.
Review
Nemi: The Strawberry Festival combines set collection, open drafting, contracts, and a turn order mechanism determined by the players’ previous choices. The individual elements fit together well, and the harvest phase turned out to be the most important part of the game for us.
Several factors must be considered when choosing a crate. The type and quantity of fruit matter, as do the supplier cards assigned to it and the position we will occupy during the next selection. A low number allows us to act again sooner, but it does not provide as many supplier cards as the higher values. These cards are needed for more than just preparing desserts. They can provide points at the end of the game, offer useful actions, or be used for decoration. As a result, the most obvious choice is not always the best one.
We consider the relationship between the contents of a crate, its supplier cards, and the order of the next selection to be the most interesting element of the game. Occasionally it is worth collecting the exact fruit needed to complete a dessert. At other times, taking several cards or securing priority during the next iteration will be more important. We also need to watch what our opponents require, as the set we are interested in may disappear before our turn arrives.
The player count has a noticeable effect on the level of competition during harvesting. In a two-player game, each person chooses one of the four sets, and the remaining two are discarded. This makes it easier to obtain the required products, and we rarely felt that we were directly competing for cards. The rulebook includes an optional, more confrontational two-player variant, but we only used the standard rules, so our assessment of the game at this player count applies specifically to the basic mode.
There is much more happening on the table with three players. Sets are more likely to disappear before we can reach them, and the selection order becomes noticeably more significant. The third player still has two options, but neither will usually fit their plans perfectly. In our group, increasing the player count from two to three noticeably raised the level of competition.
However, this does not significantly increase the length of the game. Many actions, including the entire cooking phase and the selection of cards used for decoration, are performed simultaneously. The most time is spent considering the first or second choice during harvesting. Later players have fewer options, so their decisions are usually quicker. The game itself took us around 45 minutes, while including setup and packing everything away brought the total time to roughly one hour.
Decorating the town is another interestingly designed part of the game. It takes the form of a secret auction in which the stakes are cards that could prove useful elsewhere. Gaining a few additional points may be tempting, but it requires sacrificing ingredients, special effects, or contracts. Moreover, every participant loses the cards they committed, not only the winner. There is therefore always a risk of investing too much or losing by a single point. Revealing the cards simultaneously creates an enjoyable moment of tension and is one of the few areas involving more direct competition.
The perishable fruit mechanism did not cause us many problems because, from the beginning, we planned our fruit collection with its limited shelf life in mind. Nevertheless, it serves an important purpose—it prevents players from stockpiling products without consequence and forces them to consider which desserts they will realistically be able to prepare. Sometimes it is necessary to change plans or settle for a less valuable recipe before part of the supply goes to waste.
The random card layout affects the available options, but we never felt that we lacked control during our games. Cards are selected from a face-up display, allowing us to adapt our strategy as the situation develops. We simply have to accept that the exact set we need will not always appear and that an opponent may take it before us. The game flows smoothly and provides enough room for planning and combining different options.
We also have a positive opinion of the game’s production. The illustrations are colorful and cheerful, fitting the Italian festival theme well, while the desserts shown on the board look genuinely appetizing. The foldable cardboard trays resembling wooden crates are another nice addition and are used to store the fruit tokens. They prevent the produce from spreading across the table while adding a little more atmosphere to the game.
The only minor confusion was caused by the arrows on the player boards. At first, we thought they indicated the direction in which the boards should be rotated during the preparation phase. In reality, they continue the markings along the bottom edge and guide players through the consecutive phases of a round. Once we clarified this, we had no further trouble handling the game, and our overall impressions of both the components and the rulebook remained positive.
Nemi: The Strawberry Festival is not an entirely straightforward family game, but it would also be difficult to describe it as heavy. It should work best for fans of light and mid-weight games based on set collection. It may also be a good choice for younger players who are already familiar with several modern board games and are ready to plan around a number of interconnected decisions.
Summary
Nemi: The Strawberry Festival is a colorful and smoothly designed game about gathering ingredients, preparing desserts, and making choices that are not always obvious. We particularly enjoyed balancing the benefits of fruit, supplier cards, and turn order, as well as the secret competition involved in decorating the town. Competition is fairly gentle with two players, but with more people at the table, the festival noticeably comes to life.
We would like to thank Fiammingo Games for providing us with a pre-release copy of the game for testing. This did not influence the content of our review.