Agricola: Farming, feeding and breeding
One of the oldest games I own is Agricola. It’s a classic worker-placement strategy game by one of my favorite designers Uwe Rosenberg, who I mentioned in my post about Le Havre. I love Agricola so much that I played it twice this past weekend.
Each player starts with a farmer and a spouse, meaning you can take two turns per round. As you grow your family, each new member can take a turn as well. The game is played out over 14 Rounds occurring in 6 Stages, with a Harvest at the end of Rounds 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 14. During Harvest, your crops come off the field, you feed your workers, and your animals breed.
The game comes with a board showing which actions are available each round. Once a player lands on a space, that action is no longer available that round. Also, with each new round, a new action card is flipped over and available to everybody.
So what do you do on your turn? Well, that’s a hard question. You can collect resources (wood, reed, clay or, eventually, stone) to start building rooms or renovating your house, or start laying down fences for pastures or stables to house your animals. Or you can grab a field, and then a grain, and then start sowing crops. Or you can start taking sheep, boars or cattle, but only if you have room for them on your land so they don’t run away. Or you can collect resources to do a major or minor improvement, such as buying a fireplace or cooking hearth to cook your animals or bake bread. Or you can gain an Occupation, which comes with various benefits.
The game immediately starts with a sense of urgency to collect resources and have enough food to feed your people. The cost at Harvest is 2 food per person. If you don’t have enough food, the player will take a begging card per missing food, which is minus 3 points per card at the end of the game. In Stage 1, you get 4 rounds before Harvest. In Stage 2, you get 3 rounds before Harvest. And then it gets down to 2 rounds per stage, until the end at Stage 6 Round 14, where you only get 1 round before Harvest.
There’s also the constant battle of which action to do first, as that option might not be available when it’s your turn again. Growing your family gives you more actions per round, but then you have more mouths to feed during Harvest. Scoring at the end penalizes you for each animal you don’t have, for each unused space on your land and for not growing grains or vegetables. The game is unforgiving if you start falling behind and have to take beggar’s cards. But I love that the entire game is all about having a strategy and making tough decisions.
A neat thing about the game too is that it’s customizable depending on the number of players. Different cards are in play depending on the total playing, giving different actions and keeping the game balanced. Plus, there’s an option to play the Family Game (which is the beginner’s level), as well as intermediate and difficult levels of this game. The only drawback with Agricola is that the animals are just boring square cubes. But since I also own Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small, I use the cute animeeples from that game for Agricola.
So yes, I played this game twice last weekend. I first played a regular game with two friends from a gaming group. I received great cards for my Occupation (animal tamer) and Minor Improvement, which let me double the capacity of my animals in pastures. I was able to hammer out a lot of points with my breeding, and eventually won. I also played a 4-player Family Game, which I also won, because I went ahead and grew my family at a rapid pace, which gave me more actions than everybody else. The friends I played with for the second game don’t game regularly but they enjoy playing the game with me and sharing the frustrations over what to do next!
So which games did everybody play this past weekend?