Agricola

Comment: This is an absolutely terrific game. My wife and I have played it at least 2 dozen times, and have played with friends another 10-15 times beyond that. We have a closet full of games, and this is one we keep coming back to.

I recommend this game without reservations to people who like to think. If you want to roll dice and yell, this probably isn't going to be your thing.

Comment: This game is very fun. I bought this game in the summer and played it with my friends as soon as it came in. We played it every night for the next two or three nights. Very addicting.


GENERAL INFORMATION:

Players: 1-5 (there is a 7 or 8 game 1-player campaign of sorts described in the instruction manual).

Length: The box says 30 minutes per player (for example, a 4-player game would take 2 hours). However, I have found it to take a bit longer generally.

Age: The box says 12 years and older (it is very complex).


CONTENTS:

I won't go through every part that comes with the game. Just know that there are 360 cards, 9 game boards (4 for the middle and one for every individual player), and lots of wooden and cardboard chips and tiles and such. I imagine the cards will eventually wear over time, but they are very durable as far as cards go. I have played about ten games with them, and they are fine. Everything else looks like it will hold up perfectly over time.


GAMEPLAY:

This game plays a lot like Le Havre and Puerto Rico combined. If you have never played either of these games, I recommend buying Puerto Rico immediately, then moving on to Agricola if you like it.

This game is very complex, and as such is very hard to describe, but I will do my best. The goal of the game is basically to build the most well-rounded farm. You get points for each aspect of the farm that you develop; the more developed the aspect, the more points you are awarded. However, if a part of your farm is not developed at all (if you have no cows, for instance) you get a negative point. In this way, the goal of the game is fairly abstract.

The game consists of 14 rounds of gameplay. In each round, players take turns placing their family members on different spaces on the board and taking the appropriate action. Each player starts with two family members, but can get up to five by the end of the game, so each player is taking two or more turns per round. Different spaces on the board allow you to do different things, and every round, a new space is added to the board. Some let you build fences, others let you get resources. However, no two people can use the same space in a round, so you should make your turn count. No matter what you do with your family member, you will benefit. The key is finding out what will benefit you the most. This is the key to the entire game, in fact.

The spice in the game is added by the cards. At the start of every game, each player is dealt 14 cards that cheat the rules a little bit. These cards ultimately determine a player's strategy for the entire game, since a player obviously should try to play such that s/he benefits from the cards as much as possible.

There are many aspects of the game I did not mention since they would be nearly impossible to explain with only text. If what you read in this section intrigues you, then just buy the game and try it for yourself.


WARNINGS:

This game is very long. The box says 30 minutes per player, but I think it tends to be a bit longer. In my experience, a five player game takes 3+ hours.

This game is very complex. I own Power Grid, Puerto Rico, the Catan games, the Carcassonne games, Le Havre, and more. This is almost certainly the most complex of them all. You will be bad at this game the first time you play it. My first game was with other people who had never played before, and we were all overwhelmed when the harvests started coming every other round. However, this makes the game very addicting. You want to play again so you can improve your strategy.


All in all, this game is incredible. I highly recommend it to people who like strategy games.

Comment: Agricola / B001C7617Q

I bought this game for my husband - he loves European games and has all the big names and many of the little ones. I really like quite a few of the European games now, thanks to him, and I love farming games, so this seemed like a no-brainer.....but it wasn't actually as much fun as we'd hoped.

To start with, it's a little disappointing that the game pieces for animals and crops are just different colored cubes. We'd been expecting ani-meeples and vegie-meeples, but you have to buy those separately. I'm not sure why this was so disappointing - we're perfectly used to the cubes in Puerto Rico - but maybe the difference is that in other games, the cubes are supposed to represent huge 'lots' of meat and vegetable for exporting, whereas here the cubes are actually supposed to represent crops taken directly from the ground and animals interacted with on a personal level. Whatever the reason, the cubes made the game distinctly less fun, so I highly recommend you buy the separate meeples if you do get Agricola.

The instructions are, unfortunately, what I've come to expect from European games - labyrinthine, overly-complex (as in, the game rules are complex, but the instructions make them seem even MORE so), and probably having enjoyed many adventures through the translation process - veterans will know by now that it's usually wise to cross-check informal player instructions online.

Once we started playing, I was surprised to notice how tense the game feels. I was expecting a more leisurely experience - like the gentle climb for dominance in several of the trading games, but with a more "Harvest Moon" feel, but Agricola seems determined to mimic reality by making you constantly aware of the finite moves left (the game feels intensely "short" in terms of moves), and the tension between worker supply and food supply. I can imagine a lot of players being as pleased as punch with the intense feel of the game, and I think my husband enjoyed it fairly well, but I personally frequently felt frustrated at how much of the game seems to be missed in favor of base survival. There's a lot of layers for extra functionality, and I very much wanted to experiment with owning all the animals, and farming all the crops, but too often the shortness of the game and the constant issues of needing to increase worker and food stores meant that there were only a few "correct" ways to play the game.

I'm giving this product 3 stars, because I don't think it's a bad game, or a poorly designed one - I just think it's not for everyone. If you're considering buying the game, I would recommend trying to find a copy to play through once, or perhaps looking for a recorded game to watch online - this isn't the leisurely "customize an awesome farm" game that I'd personally envisioned.

~ Ana Mardoll

Comment: I like this game a lot. I think other reviewers have outlined it well. The instructions are not that well written, but I think that is partly because the game is hard to explain. Its easier to play it or see it played to understand how to do it. Friends of our introduced the game to us and I made them play it two nights in a row, then went out and bought the game to play with some family who were in town. Did I mention I liked this game a lot?

It is complicated enough to feel like you have actual control over what you are doing. There are plenty of option, and bits, and with the different decks (komplicated, improved) there is a lot of game to play before it will feel old, as it should be for the price. That said those family members who don't like to "read the cards" didn't like the game. My brother who plays lots of games like I do caught on almost immediately and won the first time he played (by one point). My mother got overwhelmed by the occupations and improvements. She felt like there was a lot of text and a lot of things going on, which there were. I probably should have stared her out on the "family version rules."

But I like this game. Take as a recommendation though that the family rules are really there for a reason, and not just for a "Agricola light" game.

Comment: I have now played this about 6 times and have enjoyed every game. It is playable with 2 to 5 players and the game is different depending on the mix. I usually play with a group of quite sophisticated gamers and while they all have enjoyed it, some still feel that they don't quite "get" it, and had low scores to prove it.
This is the type of game where there are very many things to do, and it seems that there is never enough actions to do what you would like. Great for the serious gamer.