Ora et Labora is one of a series of games from Uwe Rosenberg that includes Agricola and Le Havre, all very good games that are partly resource management games, partly building games, partly worker placement games and partly engine games. By which I mean that you’re trying to build up interlocking pieces that work together; the player who is the best at building the engine is likely to win. Agricola is the highest-rated of these games, and is very, very good, but it is a fairly bad game for new players. Le Havre is worse for newbies. Indeed, I would say that the best strategies are opaque; I still find it extremely difficult to play well. Ora et Labora is, I believe, the easiest to pick up and play.

The basic idea of the game is that you’re building a settlement around a monastery. Each player begins with some basic resources and three buildings: the cloister office, which makes gold, the clay mound, which makes bricks, and the farmyard, which makes grain or sheep.

On your turn, you can either build a building or use a building – even a building someone else owns, if you pay a small fee. When a building is used, a worker is placed on it, making it unavailable for use for a short time. (The workers come of at the start of any turn in which all three are assigned). Most of the buildings produce or transform resources. There are a large number of resources in the game, which can be transformed into better goods and resources. Thus sheep can be processed at the slaughterhouse to become steaks, which are worth more food. Wheat becomes flour and straw, and then flour becomes bread. All these transformations require the right buildings.

To get the resources in the first place, you assign a worker to the appropriate building, such as the Clay Mound. The amount of that resource you get varies. Like Agricola, it’s an increasing value, as shown on a resource wheel. Each turn the amount you get increases, but when any player takes it the amount for that type of resource resets to zero, so there is always a battle for the right resources.

Another option on your turn is to harvest peat or wood – these are represented by forest or marsh cards on your board. Until they’re removed, you can’t build in those spots. So, the final action is to remove one of those cards and take the appropriate resource. Additional boards can extend your playing area; buying a new one of those does not take an action, but costs some amount of gold – the more that have been bought by players, the higher the cost.

Five times during the game, you get the chance to build settlements, which give victory points based on the value of the buildings around them. These settlements need food and energy to build, which is the main use for those resources. It’s the equivalent of the harvest phase in Agricola, and although there’s no begging cards giving you a points penalty, not building these settlements can result in a lot of points lost at the end of the game. My personal experience is that it is always worth building them, but I certainly haven’t explored the other strategies thoroughly!

This game was played by Sarah, Dave and me. Dave was playing his first game, and picked up the game pretty quickly.

Sarah commented later that I was interfering a lot with her game as we were playing similar strategies: she’d build the Windmill (wheat into flour) and I’d build the Bakery (flour into bread). Meanwhile, Dave was concentrating on building the biggest monastery he could, buying a lot of cloister buildings.

As normal, I played Green this game and Sarah played Red. Dave took White. You can see the wheel in the middle of the picture above; the wooden tokens on it show the current number of goods that will be gained. A pointer rotates every turn, and the game ends when the pointer has gone around the wheel twice.

Sarah and I were different in one aspect: I went for the hillside and mountain areas whilst she went quickly to the coast. I gained a lot of resources this game, particularly in the building materials of stone, clay and wood. Early grain became bread, and I harvested peat and turned into a better energy material by using Dave’s peat kiln (costing me one gold).

The above picture is my player position at the end of the third settlement phase (of five). I’ve built a grapevine and a quarry on the mountainside, and a slaughterhouse which I used only once during the game to change a lot of sheep into steaks – enough to take me through most of the rest of the game’s settlement phases. I built a Fuel Merchant to gain a lot of gold to purchase the Palace, only to have Sarah build it before me!

My biggest strategy of the game – as much as I had one – was to make sure I had enough food and energy to build a lot of settlements. Sarah discovered that she didn’t have enough food one turn to build a settlement, but consoled herself by converting a lot of goods into the victory-point producing goods. Unusually for Sarah, she was never able to convert those goods into Wonders.

The biggest surprise of the game was Dave, who completely blindsided Sarah and myself by building the House of the Brotherhood and using it to convert 5 coins into 2 VPs per cloister building… or 14 VPs! Sarah feared she’d lost right away, although I felt my superior settlements would take me through. Dave had one flaw in his strategy: he didn’t have enough gold! Thus, he was only able to use the House twice, and thus wasn’t able to build up a huge score with a lot of goods.

A final hospice into Castle allowed me to play a sixth settlement, and the game ended with some interesting scoring to come.

Here’s how the final scoring panned out:

Merric 187 = 93 settlements (21+10+21+16+6+19) + 88 buildings + 6 goods
Sarah 166 = 68 settlements (18+14+13+13) + 67 buildings + 41 goods
Dave 149 = 39 settlements (9+7+6+7+10) + 56 buildings + 54 goods

It had been a fairly close game. Dave had done very well for his first attempt, with his settlements really letting him down. I’d kept my normal strategy of gaining only a few points from goods while scoring very heavily for buildings and settlements. It’s an excellent three-player game, which is why I’d chosen it – for four or five players, I have other games.