Uwe Rosenberg (born 27 March 1970) is a German game designer and the co-founder of Lookout Games. He initially became known for his card game Bohnanza, which was successful both in Germany and internationally. He is more recently known for developing many highly-acclaimed strategy games, such as Agricola and A Feast for Odin. As of March 2023, his games held six of the entries on BoardGameGeek.com's top-100 board games of all time.
Born in Aurich, Germany, Rosenberg first began to occupy himself with the development and mechanisms of games at the age of 12.[1] He published a number of play-by-mail games during his school years. While he was still in college, Amigo published his first major success, Bohnanza. Since finishing his statistics studies in Dortmund (the subject of his thesis was "Probability distributions in Memory"), his main occupation is the development of games.
In 2000, he and a few other game designers founded the publishing company Lookout Games. It published a number of expansions to Bohnanza, partly in cooperation with Hanno Girke. Larger projects were at first published at other publishers, such as Amigo and Kosmos.[2]
Since 2005, Rosenberg has concentrated mostly on complex economic strategy games,[3] often with a farming or fishing theme: his first, Agricola, was released in October 2007 and won a Spiel des Jahres special award for best complex game of 2008,[4] and has become a staple in the European game subgenre of worker placement games. It dethroned Puerto Rico as the highest rated game on BoardGameGeek.com in September 2008 and remained there until March 2010. A second game in this series, Le Havre, was published in October 2008, as well as Caverna in 2013.[5] His highest rated game is currently A Feast for Odin, which is ranked #23 on BoardGameGeek.com as of May 2024.[6]
Since 2014, he has also designed several less-complex tile-laying games, including Patchwork.
Many of Rosenberg's designs have also been recognized as being excellent for solitary play.[7]
He married Susanne Balders on 18 May 2007. He lives in Gütersloh and works at his studio in Dortmund.