Game Daze Park Place Mall Manager Review, June/July 2009
Drew-
Agricola just supplanted Puerto Rico as Boardgamegeek’s number one rated game. What makes this game good enough to beat the highest rated game of the last 5 years? My gues would be: Variety and simplicity.
Agricola is not a complicated game, though it can be complex. It certainly has a lot of pieces: hundreds of tokens representing the various supplies, food, and animals you will collect and use throughout the game, several boards to keep track of the various actions one can take in a turn and on which to build your farm, and over 300 cards representing Occupations to take and Improvements to build throughout the game.
Game play it self in simple. You start the game with a little 5X3 grid board representing your farmstead, a wood two room house, and two people (presumably a farmer and his wife). A board with several actions on it sits in the middle of the table. The actions range from collecting all the wood or reed from a space to building a new room on your house, to plowing a field or building a pasture. Each round of the game consists of several turns. Each person in your family can do one action. Each action on the board can be done one per round, so if someone else’s family member has done that action, you can’t. Also, later in the game, your family can grow, so if your family has more people than another person’s family, you get to do more actions.
The variety of the game comes from the Actions, some of which are put out randomly throughout the game and through your Occupation and Improvement cards. Each player receives 7 of each card type at the beginning of the game. Occupation cards, like Stablehand or Wetnurse, are roles your family members can take throughout the game; roles that will give you bonuses in taking certain supplies, or building certain buildings or improvements.
Improvements, like Plows or Fishnets, give you points or bonuses when doing certain actions. Since a player gets 14 random cards out of over 300 cards available, a players cards are different every game. Furthermore, the two decks can be split into three smaller decks; an Easy, a Complex and an Interactive deck, which provides a more strategic element to the randomness.
The game last 14 turns, over 5 rounds. At the end of each round is a harvest phase, where a player will reap whatever fields he has planted; a feeding phase, where he has to feed his family; and a breeding phase, where the animals you have may produce more animals, through natural means. Food is very important, because if you do not have enough food for you family, you have to go begging, which loses you MAJOR points at the end of the game.
The game boasts a family version of the rules, which is a more cooperative play style, so though the game says 12+, if playing with the family rules, one could play with much younger children. Also, there are lots of accessories that can be added to the game, such as wooden animals, wooden people, and shaped grain, breads, and supplies that can be used instead of the cubes and discs that come with the game. Some people have even sculpted their own custom families and animals from clay and other materials.
This is one of my favorite games, with enough strategy to keep me interested and enough variety to not be boring. Mostly, I just like building my little farm and seeing it grow. :-)