Agricola

I can still remember my first introduction to Agricola, I was at a yearly christmas gaming party at a friends house and I was at the Agricola table (four or five games where running at the same time). The person in charge of explaining the rules starts with “You are husband and wife, you are farmers and are building a farm and a family”. That is the basic theme of Agricola and it stunned me as being incredibly mundane. Then he explains the mechanics: “First you most plow a field, then you can get a grain, then you can plant that grain and at harvest you get one grain back”. Even more mundane I thought and the premise of Agricola in both theme and mechanics is in fact incredibly mundane and pretty much borderline booring. But Agricola is anything but mundane and anything but booring, it is a incredible game that will have you clammering for that grain so desperatly you can almost taste it.

Agricola is a worker placement game, you have workers at you’r disposal and you place them out to do work. It may not be the first worker placement game, but for me it will always stand as the absolute definition of the worker placement mechanic. You start with two workers, the husband and wife, and later in the game you can add more workers, you’r children. These two people must do everything, nothing happens by itself in Agricola. To get to harvest grain you must first plow, then get a grain, then sow, then wait for the harvest at wich point you get one grain back. Sowing one grain will get you three grain after three harvests. High stakes stock options these are not, the return of investment is modest at best, non-existant at worst. To make things even harder each action once taken by one worker can not be done by any other that round, meaning that other players may take the actions you so dearly wanted and needed to get that last resource or to bake that important bread. Did I mention it’s important to bake bread? After all workers have been placed the round ends and players collect their workers again. A new action is revealed and resources are added to their actions as some actions are cumuluative like “+3 Wood” that adds 3 wood for each round, meaning suddenly 6 wood is up for grabs if no one took that action last turn.

One added central mechanic to Agricola is that after each harvest each family member requires food to eat, two food pieces pr. grown family member. Failure to provide food results in having to beg for it and recieving begging cards, begging cards that are -3 points each and are not possible to get rid of, so getting food to feed the family is a constant struggle in the game. And now you realize the real premise of Agricola, there is so much to do and so little time and resources to actually get to do it without starving you’r own family. For many this might not sound that much fun, but that is the strange thing about Agricola, it’s really really fun.

The game is fun because of the strange satisfication it is to get actual things done on you’r farm, to fence in that stable and get those sheep and se them get baby sheep come harvest time. To uppgrade that shabby trehouse to a fancy brick house or a even grander stone house simply feels great, but maybe I’m weird. The ever linear path of doing things is a mechanic I love in both board and PC games and Agricola does it really well, there are long paths of achievement here and they are not easy to pull off.

The base game, or family game or easy game, has major improvements but not minor improvements. Major improvements can be purchased for resources and give you points and more options in the game, usually ways to get food like being able to cook animals or bake bread. With the normal game each player starts with 7 random minor improvements and 7 occupations. Minor improvements can be purchased and will provide a combinations of points and usefulness, like getting one food each time you aquire straw for instance. Occupations may add victory point conditions and/or benefits for certain actions like making it cheaper to uppgrade you’r houses or getting extra resources for certain actions. There are a huge amount of minor improvements and occupations included with the base game of Agricola, divided into Easy deck, Interactive Deck and (K)Complex deck. These cards add extra difficulty and spice to the decisions each player makes and also prevents each round from being the exact same (alltough having played a bunch of family games they never really feel repetative).

After 13 turns and 5 harvest the game ends and the scoring happens. After five brutal harvests of feeding that hard working family comes the most brutal part of Agricola, the scoring. You see the point system is based not only on points that you get, but also negative points and negative points you don’t get. You get minus points for not utilizing you’r farmspace, for not having vegetables, for not having sheep, not having grain etc. Getting the most points means building the most all round greatest farm, something that is very dificult when other players keep getting that sheep or taking that plow action. The need to score quite evenly makes singel strategy plays useless, so all players must do at least a little of everything, ideally.

I have come to love Agricola for several reasons. I simply love the theme of being a farmer in post-plague Europe (at that time a lot of land was unused and up for grabs, hence the unused farmland). I love the basic mechanic of placing one worker and getting one thing done at the time, forcing hard decisions and prioritizing everything that get’s done to something that will not get done as a result. I love how Agricola manages to make such a mundane theme and mechanic shine into a brilliant strategic and fun board game. I love how you can play it as a brutal strategy game, something that is hard because the points are all masked behind animals and abstractions, or you can play and think only that you want to achieve certain things, like get eight sheep or three children or stone housing, either way it’s fun and challenging.

Agricola is a true classic in the world of board gaming and every player should at least play it once, after that they are probably hooked anyway.

First of all, I would like to preface this by saying I am a big fan of sheep. So, pretty much any game with sheep in it is guaranteed a good review. However, this game transcends the sheepyness and gets right down to what makes games fun in the first place: beauty, depth and accessability.

1. The components are very nice. Even with an upgrade pack in the form of ‘The Goodies’, my wife and I still play with the original roudn wooden bits because they are designed perfectly for the style of play. The boards are strong and durable, and the cards are adequate.

2. The rules take what could be a painful experience and gently dole out the advice with aplomb(correc word?). However, I would recommend a gamer try the game out solo first to work out the kinks and explain it to your less patient non-gamer friends.

3. The gameplay is superb. At first glance, the tightly controlled timeline seems to leave no room for creativity and choic of action. But, as you get a few plays under the belt, the cards and other player actions create an expansive avenue of stretegic options for you to purse, not the least of which I use, which is to grab sheep at every opportunity.

4. Lasting value is good. The cards and extra expansions offer ways to vary gameplay, but really, if you are bored by the farming theme you might get tired of it quickly.

This is a classic game, no doubt about it. Buy it and you won’t be sorry, but try it more than two or three times to really get the feel of it. Thanks for reading!

Okay, I got this game because I do a little farming and BoardGameGeek had it at #1 for a while. However, this game is very fiddly with lots of components and lots of upkeep between turns. I do appreciate that this game has tons of depth and replayability with all the different types of decks that are included.

PROS
Great Replay value
Tense theme
Deep game

CONS
Fiddly
Hard to read rulebook

Overview
Agricola is a game about farming in medieval times where if you don’t farm well you starve. In the case of this game, if you fail to feed your family at harvest time, you have to take begging cards that detract from your final score. Your goal is to have a very well-rounded farm and keep your family fed. If you focus too much on animals, you loose points for lack of vegetables, and vice versa.

Gameplay
Players take turns placing workers on resources and actions to develop their farm and make it better. As each turn progresses, more actions become available to the players, but you can only put one worker on one action at a time. So players spend their time vying for spots to do what they need for their farm and grow food. This can make the game enjoyably tense while trying to plan for feeding your family at the next harvest.

Lots of replay value built into the game, because you have many different ways to play. The game comes with three thick decks of varying complexity to play with during a game. You choose which deck you want to use. These decks provide “occupations” for your farm that give you an advantage in different areas of the game. This really ups the complexity level of the game. That’s why there is a “family” version of the game for younger people that doesn’t use the cards.

CONCLUSION
It’s a very well-designed game. I enjoy it sometimes when I’m in a mood where I don’t mind putting up with the fiddliness of so many components to push around. Nimbler minds may not mind.

If you like really complex games with some brain burning…this is your game. I can see power gamers and strategy gamers gravitating to this game. Definintely not for social or casual gamers, because it’s very complex. I would only recommend the family rules for family gamers with young middle school kids, since it removes the player decks from the game.

‘I have a new boardgame, guess its theme!’
‘Well, exploration of the universe?’
‘No, it’s about the past.’
‘Um, maybe you are a king, a knight or a merchant?’
‘It’s called Agricola. In fact you are a peasant there.’
‘???’

Have you ever heard such a dialog? I have, a few times. It turns out that a story of a peasant family may be a basis of a very interesting game.

You start as a head of a small family that has no more than a little hut and some land which may later be used to grow crops or to keep a few animals. As the game progresses your family becomes bigger, corn and vegetables grow on your fields, sheep, pigs and cows feed on your meadows, and your house becomes larger and more comfy. And all of them because of hard work of the members of your family!

The game offers many ways of development – and rewards all of them. The key to victory is balanced growth – players get more for small achievements on many nomen-omen fields than for spectacular successes on only a few of them and none on the others.

Agricola has a fairly high replay value. Due to the fact that available improvements and occupations are selected at random at the beginning of each game from a large pool of cards, there is in fact no chance that two games could ever start with the same setup. And even if they do (because the players may choose to use the same sets of appropriate cards) the play ma go quite a different way from the very beginning.

I must also praise the scalability of the game. The problem is addressed exceptionally well by selecting different possible actions (as well as restricting some job and improvement cards) according to the number of players. The game has also a built-in easy variant. Bravo!

The biggest drawback I can see is that the job and improvement cards are not well balanced. There are a few no-brainer “play me at once” cards as well as a few worthless ones. While it is usually leveled by their distribution, it happens sometimes that one player has a clearly better (or worse!) hand of cards than the others. As the game lasts about two hours such a situation may well spoil the fun. But there’s a simple cure for that – removing the overpowered and underpowered cards from the game before playing it.

All in all: it’s a good, solid game well deserving high ratings and awards it gets.

Each player has a farm board of 3×5 squares,representing the land you own. It’s here you expand your house, plow your fields and fence your pastures. The design is up to you, the 15 squares (minus the 2 representing your starting house) are at your disposal.

The main game board is little less than a collection of “action fields” representing turn actions like “plow a field”, “expand your house”, “sow your fields”, “collect wood”, “go fishing”, “collect sheep”and much more. Some of these action fields get “loaded” with stuff each turn, like the “collect wood” field gets loaded with 3 wood each turn (if no one wants to collect wood one turn, it’ll have 6 wood next turn and so on), and some are simply “you get 1 each time you go here”, like the “take 1 grain” action.

You start off with 2 family members (man and wife), so in the beginning you get to do twice each turn. The catch is, each action can only be taken once per turn. So if your opponent decided to sow his fields on his go, your plow gets magically unusable.

The goal is to build a good farm in a set number of turns. You get points for basically everything you’ve done, the size of your house and family, the number of plowed fields, the amount of grain and vegetables, the number of pastures, the amount of animals you have… and you get a minus point for each piece of land you haven’t used up and each thing you have nothing of. For example, if you have no sheep, you get -1 points. And if you have no cattle, you get another -1. All of these things are valued differently, so scoring at the end is a little tongue-in-cheek, but that’s not only bad. You can also get points if you’ve built something nice, like a cooking hearth. The only thing you don’t get points for are surplus raw materials (like wood and clay), although you can during the game build things like “table-carpentry” or “basket maker” which will give you points for surplus wood and straw, respectively.

So, the game is basically a race for the raw materials to expand your farm. You want a bigger family, you first have to expand your house. To expand your house, you need wood and straw. If the other farmers took it, you need another plan. Plow a field to later sow it and gain tons of grain? Or build some fences so you can house all those animals?

Agricola is a true strategy classic. Each player must run a farm starting with only two family members in a two room hut and empty fields. The winner is determined at the end of 14 rounds by a point matrix that favors diversity, rather than focusing on a single strategy.

Each round players place their family members one at a time on any of the available actions. After everyone has placed, family members return home and a new round begins with a new action added to the list of those available. Actions include things like plowing a field, sowing a field, collecting a resource (wood, clay, stone, etc.), building an improvement, extending or renovating their house, having a baby, etc. Once an action has been used, no one else can use that action that round, and the more family members you have the more actions you can take. Every few rounds, there is a Harvest phase during which fields are harvested and animals breed, however you must also feed you family members. Failure to do so results in major negative points at the end of the game. Thus, there is a balancing act between trying to improve your farm and grow your family, while still being able to feed everyone come harvest time.

The beauty of this game is that on every turn you can look at the board and think, “Geez, I could choose anything here and it would be helpful.” So the question becomes, “What is the best thing to do of my available choices?” The result is some very deep strategy options that change every game with the addition (or removal) of different card sets that are included with the game. In particular, one or two good cards can shape the way you play that game and the strategy you pursue. All of this gives the game excellent replay value. Highly recommended.

Overview
Agricola is a worker placement game in which you, as a family of peasant farmers, attempt to not starve. Wait, come back. It’s not as bad as it sounds, I promise, and this is coming from a typically Ameritrash gamer.

Setup
The game takes a bit of time to set up, but not too much. You set up the supply of tokens (of which there are many different types), give each player a board and their starting house tiles, and shuffle and lay out the decks of cards. How many cards are being used and why types will depend on if you’re playing the “family variant” (as it’s called in the US version) or the full game. In either case, it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

Gameplay
The framework of Agricola is pretty straightforward worker placement stuff. Each player starts with two family members to work their farms (more can be added later through taking certain actions). Starting with the first player, each player places one worker on an action space, continuing until all players have placed all of their workers. Seems simple, right? Well it is at first. The game is broken up into phases of varying numbers of turns, and each turn, a card from that phase is flipped over. Each of these cards adds an additional action that can be taken, so the farther into the game you get, the more options you have. This seems great, but at the end of each phase, you have to be able to feed your family or you will lose (probably huge) points. Therefore, the additional options only add to the dilemmas you face in taking your actions each turn, as you have more and more things you need to do, and less time between harvests to get them done. The cards within each phase are also shuffled before the game, so even though you know what actions become available in a given phase, you don’t know what order they’ll be revealed in.

The actions you can take vary from collecting resources (wood, clay, etc.) for building improvements to plowing and sowing fields to gathering resources to feed your family (wheat, livestock, etc.) to building improvements to expanding your family. There’s a lot to get done, but little time to do it in, so it is important to know what you want to accomplish before you get too far into the game.

Things are further complicated by the fact that there are also major improvement cards that can be purchased, generally making it easier to feed your family or earning additional points at the end of the game for different types of resources in your resource pool. In the full, non-family version of the game, there are also minor improvements and occupation cards that can significantly alter the strategies you employ.

After the final turn there is a final harvest, and then scoring begins. The scoring in Agricola is often criticised as being “mean,” as you lose points for not having any of most types of resources and points are capped at certain numbers of each resource, but this forces players to diversify their farm, rather than just going all in on one resource and locking everyone else out, so I don’t mind it so much. Knowing that going into it, though, would probably be helpful in determining what your strategy will be.

Learning Curve
Agricola is fairly easy to learn, at least mechanically, especially when you start with the family variant. It was the first worker placement game I ever played, and it literally took one turn to see how the game worked from a mechanical standpoint. My non-gamer wife picked it up equally quickly. The complexity comes from the wealth of options that become available and the dearth of turns you’re provided to accomplish what you need to. Once we had a good feel for the basic game, switching to the full version was a simple affair. Jumping straight past the family variant to the full game may complicate things for people new to games or even new to worker placement, but I can’t say for sure since that’s not how I learned or teach the game.

Components
The components are tricky. Depending on what edition of the game you get, your box will include different things. The version I have included the standard cubes and discs for resources, as well as the “animeeples” to replace the cubes with. As I understand it, early editions did this and the most recent ones are doing it again, but the ones in between only included cubes. As far as the components everyone gets, they were pretty top-notch. The boards and tiles are nice thick cardboard, the cards have a nice coating on them to keep them from wearing out (though they feel a bit thin for what that’s worth), and the wooden pieces are a good size to make handling them easy. On the other hand, the animeeples really add to the flavor of the game and help make it less abstract. Sure, you’re still using discs for people, stone, wood, etc, but the animals look nice and have enticed more than one non-gamer to give the game a shot, whereas cubes were off-putting.

My one complaint with the components is the lack of any sort of insert. Yes, a Plano box and some baggies solve the problem just fine, but it would have been nice for a better storage solution to be included. I know it isn’t unusual for games to lack in this area, but it still irks me somewhat.

Overall Judgment/TL;DR Takeaway
In the end, Agricola is a game I thought I would hate on theme alone, but the gameplay is so tight that I love it. The constant tension and the threat of having to beg for food keep things exciting, and the way the phases get shorter and shorter between harvests as the game goes on was a brilliant design decision as far as the excitement goes. That said, some people find the tension to be too much, and I’ll admit that some games, especially the last few turns, start to feel less like fun and more like a source of unnecessary stress, so if you play with someone who is prone to analysis paralysis, you might want to go for a “lighter” worker placement game, like Lords of Waterdeep. Agricola is a simple game to teach, but it’s meaty. I’m not much of a Euro fan generally, and even I can’t deny that this game is great.

An innovative game design that challenges the player to both focus on their own strategy and be aware of what other players are doing, in order to take advantage of any loopholes in their strategy.

The learning curve is a bit steep, and it might be a challenge for a brand new board gamer, but perseverance with this game is key, and the more its played the more the players will appreciate it, and see the nuances and subtleties.

The out of the box components are prefectly functional, however enhancing these pieces – either through the official (The Goodies) expansion or ‘home made’ approach – aids the immersion factor massively.

Repeated replay value is achieved by the inclusion of (and continued production of more) multiple card sets for minor improvements and ocupations. These cards reap benefits to the player, but being able to play them at the right time to make the maximum benefit is a challenge that adds an extra factor to the strategy of the game. If played without drafting cards, it takes a lot of plays to work through a set and understand the subtleties of the cards – and probably even longer to see powerful combinations form. Even with drafting there is plenty of scope for different cards to arrive, and players will be able to get plenty of different plays out of the game.

Its a very coherently designed game, and is ultimately popular with the majority of the boardgame community, and so every gamer should attempt to play it, multiple times to appreciate the depth to it.

Fun game all in all.

There’s a bunch to it, but you can pick it up in stages easy enough. One would generally excel in one area, and round out the others in time so the learning is naturally staggered.

That being said, it’s not all that difficult.

You can take largely the farming, baking, or livestock route to get food to feed your family. It’s interesting that they don’t die if you can’t feed them, but are given beggar cards instead. These are worth -3 points at the end so it’s best not to get them!

It’s ultimately a race for actions. Only one person can use one an action per round. The game itself scales elegantly as more actions are introduced each round, and are increasingly relevant as time would pass.

Scoring occurs at the end. Diversifying is a must to score effectively, but you don’t need to be ‘all in’, in all categories to do well. A good presence in one, with simply presence in another will net you some good points.

It scores similar to history of the world, where all teams could be very close in points in the end.

I must say, with over 100 occupations there’s tons of replay value here. You only get like ten in the beginning and that’s it.

I was disappointed at first, to the number of major improvements, but after playing a bit, they are really stepping stones for some heavy hitting minor improvements. (Go figure?)

In the end, it’s a fun, feel good, family friendly game while at the same time, not alienating gamers whom might not generally enjoy those types.

Not for the faint of heart, Agricola challenges you to build a better farm.

It takes a long time, it’s complicated as heck, but it always feels like there’s something going on. And it *never* feels like there’s enough time to do everything you want. It does not drag, if you have the 90 minutes to invest.

Game components are little wooden blocks and cards for many different things and cardboard chits for various purposes and a bunch of big pieces of cardboard for various purposes. Set up takes awhile. So does take down. Draw a few cards near the beginning, then play the game by organizing how you want your farm to grow through various mechanisms.

Take turns performing tasks (“Gather wood.” “Make a Minor Improvement.” “Family growth.” and so on.) Plow and plant your fields. Gather and shelter your various animals. Once one of you has performed a task, it is unavailable for the other players for that turn. Once every few turns you must feed your family with gathered vegetables or grain or animals; if you’ve taken the time to build a stove or a hearth it makes this phase go much more smoothly.

The problem is there is just not enough time – only 14 turns – to build the perfect farm. Every turn is a scramble to accomplish just the one or two things you need to get by. The theme of this game is subsistence farming and that’s really what it is; every harvest phase is a struggle to feed your entire family.

God I love this game. I wish I had more time (and partners) to play it. It takes awhile to set it up and awhile to put it away and it takes a long time to play – 90 minutes for 2 players, add 30 for every additional player – but when you’re ready to up your game you can’t do better than this.