Ora & Labora: Token Conversion Mayhem

I am known by my friends as a true Uwe fanboy. Hence as soon as I see something even remotely Rosenbergy, I need to play it. That doesn’t mean I love everything our favourite farmer mechanic designer puts out, and with Ora & Labora, I was initially much more enthusiastic than I am now, for a few reasons we’ll get into shortly.

Back in 2016, during one of those crazy SPIEL math trade sessions, I was lucky enough to secure a copy, as then it was out of print (and now is again, I think?). In Ora & Labora, you’re… well… praying and working? You’re assigned a small patch of land—that can be extended on any side for a pretty penny—containing a small starting monastery ready to be renovated. Your prior and its two lackeys can be put to work in a classic worker-placement fashion to gather resources, convert resources, and build more stuff.

That all sounds rather uninspired, but there are a few unique quirks here:

• There’s a spatial puzzle involved: you can only build yellow buildings next to other yellow ones (monastery extensions) and buildings score based on their neighbours. For example, buying a patch of the coastline is expensive but some buildings benefit greatly from the seaside (or even require it).
• You can’t have your workers back at the end of the round unless they’re all working. This results in interesting strategic decisions.
• Oh. Yeah. The resource wheel. Right.

As far as I know, this is the first game containing Uwe’s famous “resource wheel”—Glass Road is from 2013 and Ora from 2011:

At the end of every turn, the wheel also turns, automatically increasing the value of all the goods on it. It might be a good idea to hold off on wood collecting for a while, but in solo mode, if the wheel starts pushing a resource beyond the limit, it’s gone forever. The wheel also dictates when a “village round” is triggered, where new buildings appear and unique ones from your own stock can be placed on your tableau.

If you don’t play Ora & Labora often, the wheel with its many symbols is very confusing and requires destructing and reconstructing depending on the amount of players. Uwe’s 2023 Oranienburger Kanal, for instance, also has a resource wheel, but is much simpler to operate and feels much more streamlined. Here, if you “take” that wood (using an action that allows you to do so!), you place the token on the zero from eight back to zero and take those eight wood tokens from the supply.

This brings us to the second biggest complaint I have with this game: it is very finicky. Tokens are everywhere. Wood tokens, bread tokens, gold, ore, coal, grapes, wine, you name it: the game has it. In essence, Ora is a resource conversion game: every token can—and should—be flipped to its superior side and servers as input for an even more powerful action or more points. This “problem” is solved in games such as Black Forest (who even has two resource wheels per player) by using a single token you move up and down a track to determine the amount. If you don’t have a custom insert for this board game, expect to lose a lot of time fiddling with plastic zip locks.

My biggest complaint besides the fiddling is the seemingly endless game length, especially with one to two players. The rules require you to play through the entire building stack which will take up to three hours of tile flipping—yay? Only with three+ players there’s a “short” version of the rules and even that one takes up to two hours. I gave up my two solo attempts at two-and-a-half hours with no end in sight. Since I don’t have enough friends who are knee-deep into heavy-ish Euro games to bring this to the table more than once a year, I am often stuck with the inferior 1-2 player option here.

And that’s a shame because I really like Ora & Labora’s theme. The game comes with two sets of buildings: the French and the Irish. This providers some variability—the French grow vineyards and sell wine for points, while the Irish of course brew alcohol using different means. The spatial element that has you carefully leaving open spots for later buildings to optimize end game scores is a fun puzzle. Oranienburger Kanal somewhat has this feature as well. And did I mention that you can send your prior working on your friend’s land?

In the end, I just think there are much better Uwe Rosenberg games out there that can be finished in one evening instead of three. Given that this game is 14 years old now, I see little reason to hunt down a copy. If you’re interested in the resource wheel mechanic, check out Kanal or Black Forest instead.

• Total plays? 5. For me, it’s impossible to get to the table and I don’t like it solo.
• Solo friendly? No. It just takes way too long to finish a game, even against yourself.
• Two-player friendly? No, see above: this game is better with 3+ for the “fast” variant.
• Quality? Moderate. The building cards are small and thin, and the boards feel like thin paper pieces.

Keep or Cull? Cull. I have too many Uwes and this one almost never sees daylight.