Abroad offered some light fun, but the current BGG weight of 2.7 is an overestimation, the game is a lot less complex and strategic than that. While there is a huge stack of different cards, these cards don't combine into any engine. But as the cards usually give more victory points than other aspects of the game, what cards you draw and in which round you draw them makes a huge difference. So there is very little planning ahead, you just make the best out of the cards you are dealt every round. To me that felt a bit too random, but then I came last in both games I played, so maybe that is just my excuse.

The quality of the components of Abroad is a mixed bag: The cards with the photos of the various tourist spots in Europe are nice and good cardstock. They carry the travel theme very well. The main board is functional, but not pretty. And the player boards look and feel as if the game was still a prototype.

Fromage was a surprise, as it demonstrated the power of parallelization. Normally, a game of this medium complexity takes easily 2 hours, when one player plays after another, and everybody is waiting for their turn. In Fromage, the round game board is divided into quarters, and turns. With each player playing simultaneously in parallel on their own quarter, not needing to check what the others are doing, the whole game is over in 45 minutes, with very little waiting involved. Other games that take less than an hour are considerably less deep.

The component quality of Fromage is very good. After playing it once, I spent $10 on an upgrade with a neoprene mat and a plastic part that makes the board turn easier. It isn't strictly necessary, but helpful. Fromage comes with two cheese wedge shaped plastic trays that hold the resources, and the neoprene map fits between those diagonally in the box, so somebody obviously had thought things through. I didn't buy the luxury resource upgrade, as I found the cardboard resources practical enough.