Game(s) Played:
Agricola
Review – Agricola
This Game Is… …:
Agricola is a classic euro game of worker placement which centres around the theme of farming. Players take on the role of Old McDonald and compete with each other to build the best farm in the county. Agricola caters for between 2 - 5 Players and typically takes about 60 - 150 minutes depending on the number of Players you're having.
What would you say if your kid aspired to be the next Old McDonald? Hmm
What Do You Get In The Box?
Agricola comes with a forest worth of tokens, namely because there are so many different resources in the game. You have food resources: Grain, Vegetables, Sheep, Cattle, Pigs & Food and building resources: Wood, Clay, Stone & Reeds. Then there's the Farmers, Fences, Stables & Wood / Clay / Stone Rooms which comes in 5 different Player colours.
Trees gave their life to be forever immortalized into Agricola. It is also a nightmare to store nicely.
In a style peculiar to Uwe Rosenberg (the game's designer), you also get a main game board that comes in 3 pieces and in Agricola's case, is not even in a proper rectangular shape when pieced together. The game also comes with 5 Player boards that illustrate each Player's farmland comprising of 3x5 farmland tiles.
Herr Rosenberg's games always take a little bit of time and effort to setup. I always suggest for the game to be setup earlier if you know it is going to hit the table on gaming night.
You will also receive a stack of cards that can be categorized as follows: Action Cards, Round Cards, Major Improvements, Minor Improvements, Occupations & Begging Cards. Not all the cards will be used in every game as some of them are there to add variety to your subsequent plays, nevertheless Agricola does come with a heck a lot of components when you take everything into consideration.
I'm not an art expert but Agricola's artwork on people seem to make them look inherently drab. I'm pretty sure some farmers look pretty cool too.
How Is It Played?
Agricola is played over the course of 14 rounds with a harvest event occurring 6 times in between certain rounds. In each round, Players can use their farmers to take one action for each farmer by placing their farmer on the action space they would like to use.
The fight for 1st Player can be brutal to get choice pickings first
The game starts with some default actions that Players can take and reveals an additional action for each subsequent round until there are a total of 19 action (+4 / +6 more bonus action spaces with more Players) choices at the end of the game. The actions available in the game typically allow a Farmer to do one of the following things:
- Get Food / Livestock / Building Resources (these action spaces are replenished each round and become more attractive the longer they remain unused)
- Build / Upgrade the Farm (these actions typically require resources and are important to house your Farmers / livestock / crops)
- Add enhancements to gain minor advantages (you can hire certain farmhands that will help you around your farm / some minor improvements that help around the farm as well)
As mentioned before, Players are looking to build the best farm possible within 14 rounds and "the best" is determined based on a total of 11 different criterion and any additional bonus points derived from certain Occupations & Minor/Major Improvements. With Agricola there's no point in being a specialist sheep farmer or green thumbed tiller of soil, Agricola stays true to the traditional farmer that has a little bit of plants, some farm animals and a big family to work from dawn to dusk to manage it all.
Each category gives you -1 - 4 Points depending on the number of that category you have. It is always advisable to have at least 1 to avoid being penalized with a -1 Point
And whilst you're trying to achieve this perfect state of mediocrity, you have to contend with feeding your family at each harvest time, long range planning for harvesting crops & fending off those thieving, old dunces from yonder fence at the same table from taking the action you want before you can use it. To put it simply, Agricola is like balancing on a tight rope whilst the audience throws durians at you.
Not only could I not find a picture of people throwing durians at a tightrope walker but I couldn't even find one of people throwing anything at a tightrope walker. Agricola's just that screwy.
What I Think About The Game?
Gameplay:
Agricola is a game that is just thoroughly soaked in Old McDonald goodness. You do feel like you're working on a farm and for some reason Agricola makes it feel good, probably because you're doing the farming without the natural smell of animal flatulence, back breaking labour, getting up at ungodly hours & having to eat Porkchop, your pet teacup pig.
Who's a good lil' teacup piggie wiggie? But I bet my prize winning cow that you'd eat Porkchop in a second if it was between him & the all dreaded Begging Card!
Although the rulebook is 12 pages long in teeny tiny small fonts, a lot of it is very intuitive and usually only requires one game to fully immerse yourself in the basics of the game. And once you get a handle on the limits of each action available, you brain will kick into overdrive for long range planning. Mind you that planning and execution in Agricola are two completely different battlefields altogether.
You see, the actions that will be revealed as each round passes are not entirely random. These 14 rounds are divided into 6 stages with each stage comprising of 2 -3 possible actions which are clearly printed on the Player Help Aid. And because certain actions are absolutely crucial to the game, it is paramount that a Player's farm is ready to capitalize on these opportunities once they present themselves. For example, additional Farmers not only give Players 3 points per Farmer but also grant an additional action in each subsequent round but the Farm must have enough room for the new addition to the family or the Cattle become available in stage 4 so you better make sure you have an unused Stable / Pasture for the Cattle else they will run away. Players will need to collect resources and build the necessary facilities whilst fighting off other Players who want to do the exact same thing.
And that is perhaps the only drawback for me in Agricola. It is tough to get blocked by another Player because one unforeseen/uncharacteristic move by another Player can bring your whole plan crashing down around your ears and result in the all dreaded Begging Card which is a -3 Point penalty that never goes away and is actually a game breaker for the Player involved. A Player with a Begging Card almost has no chance of winning the game, so cumbersome is the penalty of begging for your food and you can see where I'm coming from if all it takes is that one turn to effectively knock you out of the running.
This could be how you feel.
Nevertheless it is not a fatal drawback, only a nerve-wrecking one. As long as you stay on your toes and take all your most important actions first, you should have some degree of flexibility in Agricola. In all fairness, Players may even feel challenged by this aspect of Agricola that undoubtedly brings an extra level of Player interaction to the game. My only contention is that Uwe Rosenberg's next game Le Havre has managed to give Players additional options even if a crucial action has been blocked by another Player, making it in my opinion the better game, but that's just me. I just happen to like my tea, green with yak butter.
In case you're wondering, Yak Butter Tea is real.
There are two main variants to Agricola, the family version that plays without the Occupations & Minor Improvement Cards and the full version that does. The Occupations & Minor Improvement Cards are what gives Agricola its variety in subsequent playthroughs, since you are only dealt 14 (7 Occupations & 7 Minor Improvements) of the possible 300 different cards available, it may take quite some time before you see or even use them all in a game. Thankfully the cards are not so overpowered that they can break the game and as such even in its family variant, Agricola is a deeply interesting and compelling game and I have played more games using the family variant to no detriment of the enjoyment of the game at all.
Quality:
I do have one sensitive issue with regards to quality when it comes to Agricola. Let’s run through it quickly so we can move along:
Sensitive Issue: There are some "must" have expansions that don’t "expand" the game
Vanilla flavoured Agricola comes with component pieces that are typically Euro-ish: cubes & discs in various colours to differentiate their purposes. And along came the invasion of meeples designed specifically for Agricola: the Veggiemeeples, Animeeples and Resourceeples, that actually made your little cubes look like grain, carrots, sheep, pigs and cows. Some of you are going, "Meh?!" and believe me so did I. Does it matter if I can now get a very cute little white wooden sheep to replace my white wooden cube that represents wooden sheep? "Matters indeed it does" as Master Yoda would put it.
The food tokens are especially pathetic
For some strange reason, the meeples do make a difference in the experience of the game. It just seems to make you feel more like a farmer when you have little sheep, pigs and cows in your pastures as opposed to little white, black and brown cubes. My beef with this is that you not only have to pay for it (mind you it ain’t cheap regardless of whether you go the Mayfair meeples option or buy Agricola: The Goodies Expansion), but all the previous little cubes you had ALREADY paid for in your original set become ABSOLUTELY redundant. To me that’s just not very right, like having to change all the tires on your brand new car before you can enjoy it. To be honest, I was hoping that by now, the publishers would have repackaged Agricola to come with meeples instead of cubes even if they charge a higher premium but to my knowledge, this has not happened.
The quality of the remaining components are standard issue of publishers like Lookout Games with the game boards and player boards (Even the Player Boards have a variant based on seasons) being made of thick, quality cardboard stock. The cards are of good quality although sadly I don’t appreciate the art very much, a bit too drab as I mentioned earlier, even the Gamer’s Deck cards which were ideas contributed by Agricola fans around the globe are illustrated like we’re still living in the 40’s.
Affordability:
Price ÷ Recommended No. of Players ÷ [Game Length (hour) x No. Times Game is Played in a year]
I will do two affordability calculations here, one with and one without the meeples:
[Vanilla]
RM235 ÷ 4 Players* ÷ [1.5 hours x 6 times a year**] = RM6.50 per hour per player
[Meeples RuLeZ!]
RM444 ÷ 4 Players* ÷ [1.5 hours x 6 times a year**] = RM12.30 per hour per player
* Agricola scales tremendously well regardless of the number of Players you have but my group is usually 4 Players, adjust for your own circumstances
** 6 plays a year is my number and its relatively low. Some people get a craze and an average of 30 games a year is not uncommon
Let me sum things up for you, Agricola is a good game, even without the meeples, and should be in every gamer’s collection for its timeless charm and value. Nevertheless, if you can live with being "ripped off" by buying the "expansion" or you are desperately trying to get a female to appreciate your hobby, shell out the extra $$$ like everyone else has. If you do end up having 30 plays a year, it only works out to RM0.20 per hour per player after all.
Is This Game For You?
I usually refrain from saying that a particular game is for everybody so I will say that Agricola is a game for your grandparents, your parents, your siblings and even your household animals.
One of the white balls on the table is the family pet albino dung beetle
But seriously, whilst Agricola is not the next Monopoly to take the world by storm, it has a certain appeal that breaks past the gender, age and geekiness barriers that typically come with most boardgames. The only consideration would be the hefty price tag of either (a) owning vanilla Agricola and the heavy weight in your heart of always wondering what it would be like to have meeples or (b) the number of ringgits it would cost you to own a copy of Agricola complete with the itsy-bitsy-cutesy meeples.
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