Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small

It’d be ridiculous to break out Agricola every game night. It’d be like expecting turkey every Thanksgiving. Right? Probably a bad analogy. But my point is that it’s a heavy duty game, with all kinds of stressors. Regardless of how stressfully entertaining it is, I seem to gravitate towards those complicated matters that drive my main gaming partner (my wife) crazy. That why I picked up Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small (AACBAS).

Editor’s Note: I’m typing this review on my iPad…so you’ll have to excuse the use of the abbreviation, AACBAS.

This new two-players-only gem from Z-Man Games and Lookout Games is a remarkable re-engineered idea on a board game that just does not hit my table as often as I’d like. This being the 4th Uwe Rosenberg tasty treat I own (Agricola, Ora & Labora, and iOS Le Havre), it captures a small piece of a bigger pie, and still leaves you full and satisfied as if you actually ate the entire pie.

In AACBAS, each player is running a farm with hired workers, to help get building materials, purchase and breed animals, and expand the farm. No need to feed your workers, and no worries about growing crops. It’s all critters here. 65 critters actually. There’s a number of sheep, horses, cows, and pigs that you need to grow your farm, gran points, and become intergalactic farming champion.

Each round is pretty simple, split into 4 phases:

Refill the action spaces on the game board
Send your workers out to do…work
Bring your workers back home
Breed the dang critters.

It has similar round phases to its bigger brother, but the options are limited (16 different actions you can take). And the limitation makes it less stressful, and a much quicker game. I was able to teach my wife how to play, then play a game in around 40 minutes. What?! Yep. This means that I can get my Agricola fix over lunch time, while dinner is cooking, or when we have 30 minutes to kill before we do anything that requires us to have 30 minutes to kill! Brilliant!

Each player has 3 workers and a plot of land to start with and nothing else but a cottage that can hold one animal and a few fences to start with. You send your workers out to gather the resources, whether reed, wood, or stone, and you can also send them out to get more fencing, build fences, build walls, build stables, or starte herding animals. And like its big brother, the resources in AACBAS that aren’t used are generally added on top of existing resources at the beginning of each round.

The central game board starts out with 8 fences on the side, adding once fence at the beginning of each round. This in turn acts as the game timer, and also apparently, a hardship and constraint on fences at the local … Fencery? It keeps it nice and short, and that’s where the game has a lot of the charm for me. My only drawback is that I wish it was longer than 8 turns. Maybe even 10 turns? That can easily be done, and I might give it a go sometime.

But don’t count it out. It’s a solid game with some remarkably deep strategy for such a small and quick worker placement game. And that’s where I leave you, my friends. If you have been wanting to dive head first into a Uwe Rosenberg masterpiece but are afraid of the financial and eternal investment, AACBAS is definitely for you. It’s about half the cost of its big brother, half the size, and less than half the time to play it. I have a feeling that this game will be much easier and quicker to get to the table with my wife…and just as engaging and easy to learn with my coworkers over lunch. I love the strategy, the quick play, and the dang cute little critters.

I need to start this review by making a basic conflict of interest declaration – I am a Uwe Rosenberg fanboy (fanman?). Agricola is my favorite game – I have played over forty times – and would be many more if my gaming group were as obsessed as I am.

Two of us in our group greatly enjoy 2 person Agricola – the problem though is that 2 person Agricola with the same opponent starts to become a bit predictable, even with multiple card set expansions. There just aren’t enough different moments. I block clay all game as much as possible, Jay denies me wood.

Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small gives us the basic feel of full blown 2p Agricola without making the 2 hour time commitment.

Goal of the Game:
Score the most points – usually by having the most animals at the end of the game (each of which is worth one point). Additional points can be gotten by building certain buildings or achieving certain threshold numbers of each animal type (such as 3 points for 10 cows)

Basic Gameplay:
Straight up worker placement mechanic – I place a worker, you place a worker and so on. Each player has 3 workers without any ability to increase his family size. This means that each player has 3 actions per turn. Also, all possible actions are available from the beginning of the game. You get the benefit of an action as soon as it is taken.
The game lasts a total of 8 rounds.

Actions include:
1) taking resources (wood, stone, reed or fences)
2) placing fences on your farm
3) taking animals
4) building stalls or other farm buildings

Overview:
This game has a lot of the same basic feel of Agricola. Some spots accumulate resources so you want to take them when they are just about to be irresistible to your opponent. Your farm grows but not fast enough – like Agricola you don’t have enough actions. The tension of feeding is not present in this game.

The Good:
Feel of Agricola
Short play time
Plenty of meaningful decisions

The Bad:
Same feel as Agricola – if the big game doesn’t work for you this won’t either
Not much variability – though this is fixed by adding different buildings

Final Score:
This is a great game – but suffers some of the ‘sameness’ feeling of 2p Agricola
I don’t find this as problematic as the much shorter play time makes up for it. Also the expansion ‘More Buildings Big and Small’ fixes some of these problems.

Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small is a delightful little Worker-Placement game with the theme of animal husbandry. You read that right, the theme is to raise and breed animals, on a farm. It’s farming, with animals. That’s very addictive. I can tell you’re hooked already.

This game is more than just a pretty theme, though. It’s also a fantastic introduction to Worker-Placement board games.

In Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small, the goal is to develop your small, 6 acre property into a profitable farm by the end of eight rounds. Each round you and your opponent take turns placing your three workers on available actions on the center board. Each spot on the board can only be taken by one worker, and grants a unique action to the worker’s player for that turn. These actions may do things like give the player basic resources, grant them new livestock, allow them to build a new building, expand their property, or build fences to contain their animals.

The goal of the game is to be the most successful farmer in regards to what livestock you have at the end of the 8th round. Some buildings help count towards your score, and/or give you special abilities. (Pro Tip: The Open Stables upgrade is the most useful Special Building for most strategies.) Each building costs a different amount of resources, so what you can build depends on what you’ve been able to accumulate earlier in the game. There are five actions that can be selected to take just basic resources, each one giving a different amount. Four of these restock every round, regardless of whether they’ve been claimed or not. The livestock pastures also restock every round, but what is added depends on the state of the pasture.

For example, one pasture action starts with a cow, but for every round the cow isn’t taken, a pig is added to her field. When a player places a worker in this pasture, they’ll get all the animals there. At the end of the round where the field has been emptied, a new cow is placed in the pasture. (Pro Tip: Try and hold off on selecting a pasture until there’s at least one other animal in it. If you can get a pair of a single type, that’s best.)

When you take animals, you need some place to put them. You can’t just throw them into your huge tracts of land. They’ll wander off. You have to build fences or have room in buildings to house them. There are two actions that allow you to build fences around your fields, which allows you to keep two animals of the same type per field. If you build a feeding trough in a field or building, that doubles the amount of animals you can keep there. Animals of different types can’t share space in buildings or fields, so you need to build multiple areas to house them. (Pro Tip: The sides of buildings count as fence edges. Try to plan your fields around using this feature to save your limited amount of fences.)

If you have two or more animals of the same type housed together, at the end of the round they’ll breed and produce another one of the same type. You can only get one baby animal of each type per round, so don’t think that this will escalate quickly. Also, if you don’t have a place to house the new spawn, back to the supply pile it goes.

“Okay,” you say. “This is… easy. I’ll just always make sure I go first and then I’ll always be able to get the best actions, breed the most animals, and just generally be awesome.” Nope! Here’s a monkey wrench to that little plan: One of the available resource actions allows a player to take the Starting Player Token. This is a common action available in Worker-Placement games, and it generally comes with an additional benefit. For this game, the player also gets any wood that has accrued there, which is one piece every round. This allows the player who started second to steal the glory that is being Player One. This has some pretty big implications, especially if there’s ever a time where you desperately need to make sure you get something before your opponent. Also, this action, like all the others, is available every round. (Pro Tip: Going first isn’t always the boost-up you might think it would be. Fighting over the Starting Player token is never a good strategy.)

Alright, so now that I’ve blown your minds with the basics of the rules, are you ready for the meat of this game? At the end of the game, your score is determined by the worth of your buildings, and by how many of each animal type you have. You also get a bonus according to the scoring chart, based on the total of each animal type you have. Notice that if you have less than three of any type, you lose three points. (Pro Tip: Diversity is key, but not the end all. If you can get a high volume of one type and the minimum of the others, that’ll work just as well.

I know that this is a lot. You were just looking for a good time and here I am, laying down all these action types and breeding rules. It can be overwhelming to take in all at once. But it’s worth it. For serious, it’s worth it. Worker-Placement games are often richly-themed games with mechanics that just make sense after the first turn. Once you learn how to play one, learning new games of the same type is trivial. Learning to master them, not so much. Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small is a fabulous introduction to this world of tiny wooden figures. It has a theme that is universally addictive, you can knock out a game in 30 minutes, and the replayability value is huge. No two games are ever the same.

If you’re looking to dip your toe into a popular Euro-game mechanic, or just looking for a more easily digested strategy game, look no further than Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small.

I think I am a little unusual in that I am reviewing All Creatures Big and Small having never played the original Agricola. So I won’t be giving you any comparisons with the original, bigger game.

So, All Creatures Big and Small is a nice little game about farming, resource management and worker placement. It has lovely little animeeples (which can get a bit crowded towards the end of the game when you may end up needing to stack sheep in a slightly comical way) and the tiles and boards look great. The game moves swiftly with only three things to do per player each turn, and after eight turns (and about thirty minutes once you know what you are doing) all that remains is for a couple of minutes of scoring up.

Something worth noting is that there is no randomness in the game at all, which potentially makes this quite chess-like, though the way we play it is pretty fast and loose.

I can play this happily with my wife or my nearly-six-year-old daughter (who does need some advice sometimes), which makes this a great value game for our household. I’d really recommend this as a game that really allows you to get a good Euro-game experience with just two players in a very short time. Great stuff.