The game of Agricola rose to the top of the list for this week. Ben was able to borrow a copy from another friend of his. Ben explained the rules—leaving several things out—and we began to play. (I can’t give Ben too hard of time for leaving a few rules out. It’s a big game and I’m the worse person to explain rules.) Ben had played this game about 20 times in the past, while the rest of us had never played. This did not bode well for the rest of us.
Agricola is a farming game. And just like on a real farm you have a lot of options: How are you going to use your land? Are you planting or raising animals? Should you add family members to get more work done? How are you going to feed everyone? Each turn each of your family members can perform one action. This action might bring you more wood so you can build fences, or bring you a new sheep, or add another room on to your farm house. After several turns, which get shorter and shorter as the game progresses, you must harvest and feed your family. Woe to those who don’t have enough food. Also along the way you can add occupations and improvements to your farm so it runs more efficiently and you score more victory points. Essentially victory points are awarded based upon how big your farm grows by the end of the game. You get negative points if you don’t fulfill some basic requirements.
I’m not doing the game justice as far as trying to get across just how fun it is. (But hey, I’m trying to make running a farm look like fun.) If you like resource management games, you’ll love this one. If a resource game has many ways to score victory points and more options than you can possibly exercise in a turn, then I think it’s on the right track. This forces you to decide what you are going to major in as far as accumulating those all important victory points.
In our game, many things went horribly wrong…mostly on my farm. At the end of the game, my farm looked like a barren wasteland compared to everyone else’s. Unsurprisingly Ben’s farm did very well. He won with 43 points. Both Owen and Mike did well coming in at 35 and 30 points respectively. As you can suspect, I came in dead last with 28 points.
At the beginning of the game Ben mentioned just how important it was to have a food generation mechanism in place during the game so feeding your family is not a big issue. I must have dozed off just before Ben gave out that advice, because I struggled the entire game trying to keep my family feed. Only some good occupations and improvements kept me in the game at all. A major point about scoring (and losing) victory points also never struck home. At the end of the game I had a -18 points compared to Ben and Mike who only had a -1 and a -3 respectively. (Owen had no negatives.)
We liked the game and we’re going to play it again next week. Hopefully with a more favorable result! :)
Chaos Steve