Agricola is a widely popular game that many find addicting. The goal of this review is to provide you and your gaming group with enough information to decided weather not this game is suitable.  Its a great game, one that I have played 30+ times.

 

 

 

Agricola is Latin for farmer and is often mispronounced as A-GRI-COLA, instead of AGRIC-KULA. As you can guess, this is a game about farming and this game is dripping with theme. During the course of game play you build and grow your own farm engine as well as feed, guide and grow your farming family along with it.  

 

Set in the 17th century, you start the game with a small family family of two farmers. During the course of the game you can expand your house and put your offspring to work all the while tilling your fields, planting and harvesting crops and raising livestock.

 

 

 

The goal of Agricola is to be the end of the game garner the most number of victory points by developing the most diverse farm possible. Penalties are awarded for not having at least one of something, so it is always best to strive to have a little bit of everything by the end of the game.  

 

 

Excellent, the high price tag of this game is well worth it. 

 

The game includes (as per listed within the game box):

 

• 5 farmyards for the players, 3 game boards for the game actions, 1 board for Major Improvements

 

• 360 cards including 3 sets of occupation and minor improvement cards and game play cards for 2,3,4 and 5 players

 

• 5 sets of player farm pieces (Family member discs, stables, fences)

• 193 wooden tokens (resources, animals, vegetables, start player token)

 

• 105 cardboard counters (game board tiles and markers

• 1 Scoring pad

 

 

The sheer number of components makes this a weighty game there are many many cards, counters and boards within the box, 

all with high production value.  

 

The art style of the game components is cartoons, but its well done and stylistically pleasing. Components are easily identifiable and easy to take in at a glance.  If you are one to 'pimp' your game, you can buy additional wooden components to replace the wooden counts with vegimeeples, animeeples and resoureeples tokens that are more representative.  

 

The scoring pad is nothing special and there are many that you can find online that are much more useful and easier to use. Board game geek has many files available to download for this including a few clever scoring wheels and sliders. The effort is well worth it here! (who wants to count all that up game end by hand?).

 

 

 

At its heart, Agricola is a worker placement game. I love that the theme as its easy to relate, but it has been tacked on. The game play boils down to optimizing a limited number of actions that you have available during the course of the game.

 

Each family member that you have available represents an action that you can take that game represented on the main game board. These actions include things such as plowing fields, building additions to your house, sowing your fields and collecting resources.  Improvements can be bought during the course of the game to help improve the efficiency of your farm engine.

 

 

The rule book is wordy and overly complicated. It would have benefited from sample game play turns, diagram or flow charts.  I find that the lay out of the instructions is rather disjoint and does not tie together well game progression.  There are 'sample game play' printed on the reverse of the game boards, but I found these to be of little help. 

 

There are two types of game play levels of game play provided with the game, family and the full game (a nice feature that is discussed below). 

 

Aside from the basic rules surrounding actions, the majority of the rules are located clearly on all the occupation and minor improvement cards. Each of these cards provides a way to 'bend' the core rules in some way to help you optimize actions that you take during each turn.

 

 

 

The game is broken up into harvest and each harvest broken up into a number of rounds. Early in the game there are more rounds per harvest, but as the game progresses, this decreases.  Each game you deal out each set of round cards to the game board, so that each game the order of the actions that become available varies each game.

 

During each harvest you get to reap the rewards of your labour, harvesting crops and breeding animals and most importantly you must feed your family! This is the real crux of the game! Too feed your family you need to consume the things you create, essentially consuming potential victory points.

 

The early game play focuses on two things, 1) getting your food engine up and going to feed your family and 2) growing your family to increase the number of actions that you can take.  The sooner you grow your family, the more use you get out of that family member.  Failing to do 1) and feeding your family will result in receiving begging cards which is a -3 to your score (which averages to about 10% of your overall score, a very bad thing!).

 

The game is very much about making optimal moves. There are various major (and minor) improvement cards available that you can buy to assist in making more effective moves such as cooking implements to get the most out of your livestock and crops.  

 

Agricola focuses on resource management, timely actions and long term planning with short term adjustments. 

 

Resources in Agricola are a limited thing. Each turn they replenish themselves, but its at a low rate. Its hardly ever worth taking an action when you only obtain one turns worth of accumulation on a resource (unless you are desperate). Doing so will results in a sub optimal move, and in a game where the major limiting factor is actions available, its important to make sure that you get the biggest bang for your buck for each action. 

 

You must also have good timing in Agricola, the more resources accumulated on an action, the better that action is. Being able to pick out when the best chance or time to take an action is key to doing well in Agricola.

 

Agricola really rewards conservation and management of resources and long term planning. Being able to see at least as far as the next harvest and how you can feed your family is extremely important. Often you will need to string together several actions to be able to feed your family (i.e. gathering resource to buy a cooking implement to then take an animal gathering action to then turn those animals into food).

 

The problem is that everyone else is doing the same thing and there is hardly the chance to get all the actions that you want when you need them, but that is what makes the game challenging and so engaging. You are continuously revising your plans.

 

On top of planning and managing your resources, what makes Agricola shine is the Occupation and Minor improvement system. 

Each game you will play, you will receive a whopping 7 minor improvement and 7 occupation cards. That might not seem 

a lot, but in a game where you should never play more than 2 or 3 of each, its provides a significant amount of variety to each game.

 

What makes these cards great is that they provide a way to 'bend' the core rules to the game and allows you make more optimal moves and choices during game play. They might eliminate the need to collect specific resources, or help you feed your family or provide you with additional victory points.  Until you learn all the cards, a good 10 mins at the beginning of each game can be spent in trying to determine what cards will help you best during the game. You just have to be careful as not to try and play too many of these cards as it will require actions to get them out, which will often hinder your score aside from helping it!

 

 

There are two games modes to Agricola one being the full game the other branded as the family game (no occupation or minor improvement cards).  I found this to be great as a learning tool for those first few games to help learn the game.  

 

The cards add a level of complexity that is better saved for later games.  They can prove to be a major distraction for whose whom are learning the game. 

 

Even with the family game, Agricola has as steep learning curve.  Not so much in the individual actions that you take during the game, but more so in being able to string it all together and being able to perform long term planning. 

 

I find that there is a large disjoint between early and late game. It took me the better part of 5 games to really grasp that most if not all your points are earned during the last few turns.  I suppose its in the nature of the games escalation. By the last two harvests, people have at least 4 family members and are able to string together much more complicated and bigger point rewarding actions (large fence build, a timely collection of large number of animals etc) all in rapid succession.  Up Till this point, you were struggling to simply feed your family.  This took a long time to get my head around as well. 

 

It also took many game plays to be able to identify 'screw your neighbour' moves, being able to watch your opponents moves and game board to determine what action will hurt them the most (i.e. the timely taking of a reed to block them from being able to expand their house and thus their family, severely crippling them later in the game).

 

Not that any of these things are not insurmountable, but Agricola requires a fair amount of concentration during game play. Its definitely not a beer and pretzels sort of game.  I would not recommend it as a gateway game.

 

 

This is one of the best features of Agricola, it scales really well between 2, 3, 4 and 5 players! Most games that I play 

have a sweet spot and many games are just not enjoyable with only 2 or 3 players. Not so with Agricola! Though I find 5 player sessions long (but that is ok), the game is engaging at all player amount levels and no sacrifices are ever made in sake of game play.  

 

The game well designed with scalability in mind with Action/Round, occupation and minor improvement cards scaled for each combination of number of players.  This was simply genius. You can tell simply by this the amount of game play testing that went into this lovingly crafted game.  

 

 

Extremely high. 

 

The sheer volume of cards (360) and all their combinations makes each game of Agricola unique. Each game ends with you wishing for one more turn. The limited nature of actions available during each game really makes things tight, you never have enough time to do everything that you want, drawing you back in for another game to explore a different strategy.

 

 

Agricola is fun and approachable. The theme is easily relateable and each piece of information makes sense in and of itself. The game does take time to learn and master, but its rewarding. At the end of each and every game you have a sense of accomplishment (win or lose) from building and running your own farm.  I think that is the biggest draw of the game in my mind. Its often hard to create a competitive game that doesn't leave someone feeling left out. The fact that you created something really adds to the level of enjoyment and players walk away with a positive experience and sense of accomplishment.

 

 

3/3 For components and production value

3/4 For fun and ease of learning (a star is lost here for the learning curve and mediocre rule book)

3/3 For replayability and value

 

 

 

I highly recommend this game. Its fun, addictive and provides a sense of accomplishment each game w/o no one player feeling left out or burned by another. Something that can be difficult to find at times. A must buy on any serious games list (or even not so serious gamer).

 

Still not sure about this game? Try it online for free:

 

http://banach.ucsd.edu 

 

Not the best interface in the world, but it will help you learn to play the game and give you an idea if its something that you would enjoy.