Thoughts on Agricola

As reported earlier, I received the gift of this game a few months ago. I've played a few 2 person games against Jill, a 3 person affair that included our friend Josh, and 3 solo ventures. Yes, the game comes with a solo variant. I make sure to keep the blinds down.

Agricola is Latin for farmer, so the game is about managing a farm. The image below shows your farm mat, which includes a two-room wooden house, a few plowed fields, and some fenced pastures, one of which contains sheep.



Shown below is the setup for a solo game



On each turn, you can take as many actions as you have family members. You start with a husband and wife, and you use their tokens to claim actions on the action board. No one else may claim the same action on a turn. If you build another room on your home, you can have a kid, which is obviously a great plan if you want to get more done on your farm. At the end of the game, your farm is scored for its completeness (all spaces used), upgrades (bonus points for family members and for upgrading your Wood house to Clay and then to Stone) and variety (good representation of the various crops and animals).

At several points in the game there is a harvest. At this point, you must be able to feed your family 2 Food per family member. Failure to do this is bad. You can get Food directly off the Action board, or you can build improvements to make Food more easily. The Fireplace allows you to cook meat, so you can convert your animals to Food. The more baroque method is to bake bread. This is how you do this, in terms of the number of actions you must take to accomplish it: 1) Take Grain, 2)Take Clay, 3) Take Stone, 4) Major Improvement (build an Oven), 5)Bake Bread. This is tough to get off the ground in the early going, but you do get to convert one Grain to 5 Food by baking Bread. If you also 1)Take (another) Grain, 2)Plow a Field and 3)Sow, then you can collect Grain for the next three Harvests, which will allow you to Bake Bread at any point during your turn. Got it? Much easier to slaughter the sheep and go to the fishing hole (ain't that always the way?).

There are many more wrinkles to the game, but I think that the above gives you the basic flavor. The thing that makes this game different from many of the other resource management/economic development games is the cards. Everyone gets 7 Occupation cards and 7 Minor Development cards at the start of the game. You have to use an action to play a card (plus many of them have resource costs as well). Cards can combine in obvious or subtle ways to provide you with a unique path to victory. In addition, there are 4 decks of cards that come with the game, one of which consists of very helpful, obvious-use cards, and two of which are relatively more interdependent upon other cards to be valuable.

There's a lot of game here, in terms of replay value and material components. It's way less complicated than it looks. A 3 player game shouldn't take more than 60-90 minutes, and there's plenty to think about when it's not your turn. The game moves along nicely, and every game is quite different.

A critical upgrade of Agricola, if you have it in your collection, is an organizer. The one shown here costs $3.49 at Home Depot, and saves roughly 20 minutes of setup and breakdown, not to mention table space.


My final analysis? A pretty good game that is a cut above most. Jill is definitely a fan. I give it a rating of 8 (out of 10), and it could well go up after more plays. Thanks again to Mustafa, Kathy, Jon, and Em!