Agricola
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Product Summary
Brand: Z-Man GamesAudio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Model: 7026ZMG
Product features:
- For 1 to 5 players
- Play time of 120 minutes
- Agricola is a fun family game
- Contents: 360 cards, over 300 wooden components, 50+ tiles, 9 boards, tokens, scoring pad
Toys and Games Reviews of Agricola
Customer Review: One of my two favorite games ever!
Summary: 5 Stars
I LOVE Agricola! I'll explain why later, and try to break the game down for those who enjoy that type of thing:
OBJECT OF THE GAME:
Score more points than your opponents! But there's no point scoring during the game. Points are tallied at the end. The object is to build the best, most complete farm. What goes on a farm? Fenced pastures with stables, animals in those fences, fields of grain and vegetables, and your home, which starts as a two room shack that you'll want to build into a more solid house. With end-of-game scoring, you're penalized if you're lacking any type of animal, if you're lacking fields of grain or veggies, if you've got unused acreage, and if your house is a pathetic embarrassment that a homeless cowboy wouldn't bother sleeping in on a rainy evening. You've got to consider everything!
GAME MECHANICS:
The Mechanics are simple: The game is broken into 14 rounds, and in each round, you have a minimum of 2 turns. At the beginning of a round, you furnish the "action" board with a round's worth of supplies. Put a reed disc on the Reed area, put 3 wood pieces on the wood area, put a couple pieces of food on the Fishing area, put a sheep piece on the sheep action area, etc. When it's your turn, you take your family member (represented by a colored disc) and put it on one of the action spaces on the board. For that round, that action is yours and yours alone. So if you put your piece on the Wood action space, you get to collect the three wood on that space. You put the three wood pieces in your supply area. When the next person has a turn, they have to pick a different action other than taking wood, because you just took that one. Maybe they'll take the Clay action (which is a commodity needed to buy a fireplace or build other things). When it gets back to your turn, you now have one more turn this round. Perhaps you choose to plow a field. That allows you to put a field marker on your personal farm board. Now your opponents cannot use that action in this round.
When the round is over (when everybody has had their two turns), you begin the next round (unless there's a harvest), and the start of the round, again, has you filling the action board with supplies. 3 more wood, 1 more reed, one more clay, etc. If nobody took a wood action in the last round and there were already three wood on the wood space, now there's 6 wood on that space. Every round, things like wood, sheep, reed, stone, etc keep getting added to until somebody takes them. So on your turn you have to decide: Do I want to take those 3 wood, or can I risk not taking them and waiting till the next round, hoping nobody else takes it and I can grab 6 wood with just one turn?
STRATEGY:
You start off with two people (farmer and spouse) which gives you two turns. You can add a kid to your family, which gives you an extra turn (each family member gets one turn, so a family of 4 gets you four turns per round). But early on if you want to add that kid to give you that third turn per round, it's going to require you build another room on your shack. That's going to take some wood and some reed. But you also need wood for building fences. You need fences to hold more than 1 animal in your field. You need a stable to hold many of one kind of animal in a fenced area, and that's going to require some wood to build, too. Using up action after action just to get 3 wood per shot isn't going to cut the mustard, because you also have to plow fields (there's one action), fill it with grain (there's another action) or vegetables (another), and you still have to feed your family, because come harvest time, each family member needs two food to survive. The way scoring works, you really don't want to be caught at harvest time without enough food to feed your family. There are actions (turns) you can waste on grabbing food, and there are also actions that allow you to convert grain into food, and actions that allow you to buy a fireplace or hearth to cook animals and make them into food for your family. So what do you do with your turns? What will your opponent do? If there are a few sheep on the Sheep action and you're the only one with a fenced area on their farm, you can wait out taking that sheep until somebody else adds a fence, and that might get you extra sheep for that one action. So each turn is a big decision. What can I do to improve my farm, and if I don't take this action, will that action be available to me in the next round, with greater value?
It might be nice to snag the reed action when there's a couple reed sitting there, but wouldn't it be nice to spend the same single action on that reed when there's four reed on the reed action spot?
You cannot waste moves in this game. When you waste a move or make a bad move, it will end up costing you in the end. You'll have situations where you need food come harvest time which will require you bake bread, but you've only got one turn left and you still have to add grain (1 turn) and sow/bake bread (another turn). Damn, if you only had another kid!
You need bargain moves, and you need to anticipate what your opponent needs, so you can pass up actions now and take them later at a better bargain.
SCORING:
You get negative points for having unoccupied farmland, a lack of a certain type of animal, a lack of a veggie or grain, etc. The more kids you have, the more animals, the better the house, the more fenced stables, the more plowed fields, the more improvements on said houses, the more points you get.
WHY I LOVE THIS GAME:
When you finish the game and you have filled your field (sometimes you wont) and you've converted your little shack into a 4 room stone house and you have fields filled with grains and vegetables and you have cattle, pigs, and sheep roaming in fenced areas, you feel pretty damn good about yourself and all that time thinking and banging your head against the table and taking 5 minutes to think of the best move possible and saying "I know I know. I'm almost ready. I'm thinking!" ends up being worth it. It's a frustrating game when you've taken some bad risks and find yourself behind the 8 ball so to speak, but it's so much fun when you see your last 4 or 5 moves on the horizon and feel like you've got a great chance to make an impressive farm. And then when it's over, you just want to sit there and look at all you've done. :) Don't clear the board yet. I want to look a little longer and talk about why I just kicked ass at this game. :-p
I love this game because even after I've played what I consider to be a decent game, I feel like there's SO much more intricacies to learn about this game and better strategies to play. Every game requires a lot of thought and nervous tension while you wonder what your opponent is going to do, what you're going to do, and how you're going to feed your family.
THE RULEBOOK:
The rulebook is useful as a reference AFTER you know how to play. Visit youtube and look up the Agricola Review from Board Games with Scott in order to learn how to play.
Description of Agricola
AgricolaBoard Games Toys
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