Wouter & Ymke 
Nemi is a small village in the hills outside Rome, overlooking Lake Nemi, and strawberries are a rather important part of life there. The area is connected to stories about the Roman goddesses Diana and Venus, but these days it is probably best known for its tiny wild strawberries. Since 1922, Nemi has celebrated them with an annual Strawberry Festival, filling the village with flowers, food, music and the traditional Fragolare, women in traditional dress who hand out strawberries during the festivities.
Nemi: The Strawberry Festival takes that celebration and turns it into a game about gathering fruit, collecting ingredients, making desserts and decorating the village. We’re all contributing to the same festival, but naturally we’re also keeping track of who contributed the most. There is a Golden Strawberry at stake, after all. The game looks very friendly when it reaches the table, although it didn’t take us long to start paying rather close attention to who was taking the strawberries we needed.
👥 2-4 players, ages 8+
⏳️ Playing time: 45-60 minutes
📝 Designers: Valeria Cavasin & Edoardo Eibenstein
🎨 Artwork: Simone Grünewald
🏢 Publisher: Fiammingo Games (prototype copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
A game of Nemi lasts four rounds. The first round consists of harvesting and decoration, while rounds two to four begin with preparation and end with cooking. Flowers are your points, and you’ll collect some during the game while others are added during final scoring.
During harvesting, one card is revealed from each of the four harvest decks. These cards show different combinations of strawberries, wild strawberries and blueberries. Supplier cards are then placed underneath them. The first two harvest cards each receive one supplier card, the third receives two and the fourth receives three. In turn order, you choose one complete combination, taking the supplier cards into your hand and placing the fruit on the leftmost cutting board of your player board. Some harvest cards also give you a flower immediately. New combinations are revealed and players continue choosing until the supplier deck for that round is empty.
The number of the harvest card you take also determines when you’ll choose during the next selection. The player with the lowest number goes first, followed by everyone else in ascending order.
Fruit doesn’t stay fresh forever. During preparation, your player board is rotated and the fruit on the cutting board that has reached the bottom is discarded. A new supplier deck is also added for the next round before the board is rotated again. You have two cutting boards available during play, so older fruit eventually disappears if you haven’t used it.
Supplier cards are mostly ingredients such as milk, sugar, eggs and recipe books, but you’ll also find objectives and cards with special effects. Objectives can score at the end of the game, provided they’re still in your hand. Every supplier card also has a number used during decoration. Everyone secretly chooses at least one card, then reveals at the same time. The player with the highest combined value scores flowers, with tied players both receiving the points. All cards used for decoration are then discarded, whether you won or not.
Cooking starts from the second round. Each of the six desserts requires a particular combination of fruit and supplier cards, which you discard to prepare it. Every player has an apron token on each recipe track, and completing a dessert moves the corresponding apron one space forward. You can make several recipes during the same cooking phase, including the same one more than once, as long as you can pay the ingredients. At the end of the fourth round, each recipe scores its flower value multiplied by the number reached on its apron track. Remaining supplier cards can then provide additional points through objectives and other end-game effects. The player with the most flowers wins.
Artwork & Components
Nemi is very pink. Not entirely pink, admittedly, but enough that there is absolutely no mistaking what kind of festival we’re attending. The main board uses soft pinks and creams alongside flowers, fruit and illustrated desserts, while the wooden-looking player boards and orange fruit boxes add some warmer colours. The six desserts sit across the centre of the board, and I have to admit that staring at strawberry cheesecake and tiramisu for an entire game isn’t the worst problem a board game has given me.
The player boards look like small kitchen workspaces, complete with two cutting boards, utensils and reminders for the different phases printed around the outside. Because the cutting boards physically change position when you rotate the player board, it’s easy to see which fruit is getting old without needing another track or marker.
There are plenty of custom pieces as well. The box contains separate strawberry, wild strawberry and blueberry tokens, six apron tokens per player for the recipe tracks, and two flower markers per player for keeping score. The fruit comes in small cardboard component boxes designed to look like wooden crates. The supplier cards use illustrations for ingredients, characters and objectives, while the pink gingham card backs suit the strawberry festival theme without making the table even busier.
Our copy is a prototype, so the final production may differ from what you see in our photos. Everything was easy enough to identify once we knew what the different cards did. Some of the smaller card text naturally requires a closer look, but most information you’ll check repeatedly is shown through illustrations, numbers or the layout of the main board.
Our Experience
Nemi got to the table easily for us. The individual rules are straightforward, and after the first round we already understood what we were supposed to be doing. During that first game, harvesting was mostly a shopping exercise: find the fruit needed for a dessert and take it. That didn’t last very long. Soon we were looking at the supplier cards underneath as well, then at what other players were collecting, and eventually at where a harvest card would leave us in the next selection. More than once we took a smaller pile because we wanted to choose before someone else next time. We also did the opposite, grabbed the attractive pile and then watched the card we really wanted disappear before our next turn.
Supplier cards took us a little longer to get right. At first, an egg was an egg and sugar was sugar. Then decoration started stealing cards from our hands, while objectives gave us reasons to keep others around much longer than we normally would. Some objectives pushed us towards desserts we’d barely considered. Others sat hopefully in our hands for four rounds and scored absolutely nothing. We also discarded objectives for decoration only to realise later that we would have completed them.
Decoration became less polite after our first game. Initially we were both careful because neither of us wanted to lose useful cards. Then someone discovered they could win several flowers without committing very much, which naturally ended that period of peaceful cooperation. A few rounds later we were both staring suspiciously at each other before revealing cards we’d immediately regret losing.
The rotating cutting boards caught us out as well. Early on, we happily collected fruit because fruit is useful, right? Then several strawberries disappeared while we were still waiting for the supplier card needed to finish a recipe. In another game we had cutting boards full of berries and still couldn’t make what we wanted because we were missing a single egg. Apparently the true enemy of a successful strawberry festival is occasionally poultry. After that, grabbing fruit just because there was plenty of it became considerably less appealing.
We also started watching the other recipe tracks more closely. If someone kept preparing the same dessert, there was probably a reason, even if their objective remained hidden. Sometimes that was enough for us to take a harvest combination partly because we suspected somebody else wanted it. Other times we completely misread the situation and ended up with ingredients we didn’t particularly need. The interaction never became aggressive, but there was definitely more looking around the table in our later games.
Our Thoughts
Nemi uses a fairly small set of rules, but the fruit and cards don’t stay neatly in one lane. Supplier cards might be needed for a dessert, kept for an objective or thrown into decoration, while fruit is only useful for as long as it stays on your cutting boards. You can end up with an impressive pile of strawberries and still be unable to make the dessert you wanted.
Most plans only reach so far, though, and sometimes the supplier card you need simply doesn’t appear at the right moment. That’s our main criticism. Objectives may point you in one direction, but you can’t assume the cards will cooperate all the way to the end. If you like deciding on a strategy early and building towards it for the rest of the game, Nemi will probably ask you to change direction more often than you’d like. We generally didn’t mind switching desserts or finding another use for our fruit, but there were certainly moments where we were waiting for one particular card and would have preferred a little more control.
Most of our longer decisions happened during harvesting. Decoration and cooking happen simultaneously, so there wasn’t much sitting around while somebody completed their entire turn. Older fruit physically moves closer to being discarded, and the six recipes and their ingredients remain visible in the centre of the table. I like that you don’t have to remember much of this in your head. And collecting fresh fruit, using it before it spoils and turning it into desserts feels at home in a game about a strawberry festival. Occasionally sacrificing perfectly good ingredients to decorate the village is perhaps less sensible, but festivals have their priorities.
Repeated games change the supplier cards, objectives and combinations available to you, but they don’t fundamentally change what you’re doing. The six recipes remain the same, there aren’t highly asymmetric player abilities, and you’re not building an engine that develops in a completely different direction every time. If that’s what keeps you returning to a game, Nemi may eventually feel limited. We weren’t really looking for that here, and the changing cards and other players did enough to stop us following exactly the same route each time.
This is one we could easily bring out with people who don’t play many board games, without feeling like we’re only playing it for their sake. Its randomness and limited long-term planning won’t suit everyone, and that’s probably the main thing to know going in. For us, there was enough happening between harvesting, disappearing fruit, objectives and those occasionally painful decoration choices to keep us involved. We usually finished with at least one thing we wished we’d handled differently. More often than not, we were happy to have another go at getting it right.
Nemi: The Strawberry Festival is currently on Kickstarter as part of Fiammingo Games’ Cozy Bundle, together with So Happy You’re Here! and The Witches’ Road. The campaign runs until 29 September 2026 and has already reached its funding goal.
📝 We received a prototype copy of Nemi: The Strawberry Festival from Fiammingo Games for review.
