Uwe Rosenberg’s Agricola, published by Lookout Games, is a masterful blend of the resource-management, worker-placement, and strategic planning. The players set their game pieces on the intermediary spaces of the action selection board, which is off to one side, and once everyone has chosen the action they wish to do (with no two players being able to select the same action), the actions are carried out on the main board. Decisions must be reached and plans must be drawn in those tight minutes when you’re selecting an action and you’re “pulling back” to see the level layout after multiple actions resolve.
Agricola had me hooked from the start with its intoxicating mix of tough choices and pure, unadulterated themes.
Agricola works well for one to five people and offers opportunities for a unique puzzle aspect in solo play that unfolds as part of clear and satisfying strategic thinking. In fact, as the player count increases, the depth of strategic thinking should be reduced. And you can bet that many player groups will not allow even a possibility of strategy reduction anywhere near them. The fact that Revolution Games (whose mission statement effectively translates to “Let’s make games that people will enjoy playing more than once”) has pulled such a rabbit out of its agrarian hat is very impressive.
Agricola’s artwork and components are effective and delightful. The game stars wooden pieces to represent family members, animals, and resources, and it uses a modular board that keeps things dynamic and good-looking. Design-wise, it works. “We could’ve done it another way,” points out designer Uwe Rosenberg.
Agricola really pushes one to the limit of one’s strategic thinking, adaptability, and resource management. I truly get pleasure from just scratching the surface of working out the next couple of moves that will keep not only my farm going, but with some consideration for my neighbors as well. And this is the game that I’ve returned to in my collection as one that gives me that pleasure most consistently and for the longest duration.
Preparation
Agricola may seem overwhelming to set up, but once one knows the components of the game, it has a swift and intuitive way of getting started. This is a nice game board setup for Agricola. In this tutorial, we’ll go through how to set up a tactical board game and manage your resources.
Start by setting up the main game board. This board has spaces for the different action cards, as well as room for the resources and development tiles. If you’re playing a game with multiple people, the game board also has room for the “major improvements” that players can build over time. Once you’ve set up the main board, the round cards get set up next to it. These cards manage the 14 different rounds that make up a game of Agricola. The round cards are shuffled and placed face down at the start, and then one is flipped up at the start of each round to show what can be done in that round.
Every player is given an individual farm board. Initially, you have you have a setup with two rooms and two family members, but this is where you will develop and grow your farm. The game has two kinds of goods: building resources and food. You can see the kinds of building resources in the middle section of the main game board; in this game, you might use wood, clay, reed, or stone. You can see a quantity of food depicted in the upper right-hand corner. We will play this game in 14 rounds. To feed your family, you will need 14 food. The round card depicts precisely what will happen this round: a round event in the upper half of the card and the round number and a phase description on the bottom half.
The game comes with many types of tokens for the different resources in the game, such as wood, bricks, and stone. These resource tokens help the players identify at a glance which resources they have in front of them. To gather these tokens, the player will need to instead look at the corresponding card that “says” to gather these tokens.
Take the occupational and small improvement cards and give each player the usual starting hand— seven cards. These are great abilities for a player to own and play with a direct effect on the strategy. How can you turn the cards’ abilities into abilities you can benefit from? Play the cards too early and you can leave yourself in a hole, especially in the early post-fence game; play them too late and it’s like you’re building your haystack when the cold weather is already coming.
Put the main improvement tiles on the spaces provided for them on the main board. These tiles stand for major advancements like ovens or cooking hearths that the player may want to build on their farmstead. When a player uses one of these in their farm, it often means they have reached a Land Caution of their own. For one, when I reach an “Era of My Farm, I Cannot Be Stopped!” level of strategy.
In the end, determine who goes first. You can do this by picking a name out of a hat or by allowing the person who last visited a real-life farm to go first. The first person gets the “you’re up first” token so everyone knows whose turn it is. Of course, the token then travels around the table in clockwise order.
Now that you’ve finished all that setup, you’re prepared to experience the deep, satisfying game Agricola has to offer. Don’t balk at the time you just spent getting everything ready to play. In itself, it has great importance: It makes what’s to come much more meaningful. If you don’t know much about farming, you’re learning as you play. With that also comes the realization of how poor a farmer you are when you mess up. It’s not Farmville. It’s not some mindless pursuit. It’s not even just a game. It’s exactly what it sets out to be: a great simulation of mankind’s oldest pursuit.
What the Game Involves
Where Agricola really comes into its own is through its gameplay. This is an incredibly rich and rewarding game, requiring some careful forward-thinking and strategic planning. In each round, you take turns with your opponents to place those oh-so-adorable animeeples (that’s “anime” + “meeple”, and it refers to the charming little wooden figures used to denote your family members and workers in the game) onto different action spaces. The main board is yours for the taking. The spaces you choose to perform actions in are your bread and butter, and they have a direct impact on how well you can feed your family, expand your house, and plow your fields.
Each round starts by turning a new round card, which adds a new action space to the board. This expansion of the world of actions happens very smoothly and makes the game feel completely different in the late stages compared to the early ones. In my first few plays, I could feel my heart race every time a new card came up, and I realized that with even more new cards coming my way, I had to make some serious decisions right now if I wanted to have a big, sturdy turn at the end of the round.
In their turn, players put one family member on an action space where no one else’s family member is. Then, they do whatever action is written there, such as getting more wood, clay, or reed for resources; ploughing more fields; sowing more crops; building more fences; or making their home larger or just more up-to-date. The point of the game is to feed your family, and some actions are just more point-worthy. They are also instances of actions that everyone knows they have to fight for, which builds into the tension of your story.
Agricola is all about finding an equilibrium between gaining resources and growing a family. You can have all the resources in the world, but if you don’t have a family to do the work, it won’t amount to much. So family growth is crucial, and it’s achieved by expanding your house and producing offspring when you have paired family members. But if you take the risk and use your resources to grow your family, those risks might not pay off when it comes time for the harvest if you haven’t set certain things up first.
Included in the game are six phases of harvest, which happen after specific rounds. A bell tolls, and the “pay or play” component of the Uwe style of game rears up. At this time, you must take one of the forms of payment available to you to pay off the debts you’ve accrued by “play.” Then, you must also ensure that you’re directing “actors” on a working farm toward a series of goals that, when reached, define the farm as solvent. Play, and the appearance of checkpoints in the form of the Tolling Bell, ensures that actors in the game remain present and that the player’s appearance of progress is visible.
Your strategy is profoundly impacted by the occupations and minor improvements you have as options. The unique abilities and bonuses these cards confer can make the big, bold moves of worker placement even weightier. And this is especially true when you consider that in Agricola, everything you do and everything you have can be put to use. Nothing is wasted. By way of example:
In one particularly satisfying game, I managed to create a cadre of synergistic occupations that, in turn, yielded massive food production. I plowed with impunity and sowed like there was no tomorrow. When I led, I led comfortably.
The game is about building a farm. Have you ever done that? The best thing is, the game gets more interesting as time passes. This is because the fun in Agricola is watching your farm take physical form. The hills and valleys of the board become the features of your landscape, and the pieces and cards that are played on your side of the fence become a tangled language of expression. In this game, when you lay claim to an object or area, it becomes an aspect of your farm, and all of the things that make up your farm—quantity of and varieties of animals, the number of rooms in your house, the fields and pastures, the fruits and vegetables you’ve planted, the objects you’ve built—gain a tangled language of expression that allows your farm to be read as something you’ve cultivated.
Playing Agricola is deeply satisfying. It has the right amount of strategic thinking, making you feel clever when things go well. It also forces you to do a fair amount of arithmetic, which is generally a good thing for board games because it adds an important “resource management” aspect that’s central to Agricola’s design. And all this takes place within the context of a nice, family-friendly theme that offers some decent opportunities for laughter.
Agricola has many elements that have allowed it to be considered a classic. It is a board game loved by the so-called board game hobbyist “community.” The game’s rules are hefty; there are more than 40 nearly standard-sized cards. But if you stick with them, you will find that Agricola has impressive depths to play in. The number 40 is also the number of actions one gets to take, though the number 401 is the number of ways that doesn’t always quite work out. Agricola “play,” in the sense of resource management, I (and my friends) being totally pushed to our limits to find an adequate method. We are sure we’re not playing optimally, but then, what fantasy is the game? The play extends to the stuff one does after heaven.
One huge benefit of Agricola is how well you can lose yourself in its theme. You don’t just feel close to the action—you’re in it. Through a series of smart design choices, Agricola simulates 17th-century Middle European farm life, which makes it seem very real. Apparently, this was done by not only integrating the theme as the central organizing principle, but also by researching real-life farm-family concerns of the time.
The quality of the artwork and the components is extremely high and features major standouts. It is incredible when you first unbox Agricola and take in the amount of sheer craftsmanship that has gone into it. The game is full of not only useful boards, decks, and cards but also beautifully made pieces representing the workers and animals of the land. The tiny details in the pieces are wonderful and range from realistic renderings of hands all the way down to the variety of animals’ faces.
Another strong point of Agricola is its replayability. More than 100 occupation and minor improvement cards mean that each game is unique, as no two games use the same combination of cards. At the start of a playthrough, you lay out the occupations and improvements that will be available for use in the game. What cards come out in the first round affect what strategy you can or must use. The game is long, usually taking three hours or more to finish. And at the end of such an investment in time and brain-power, there is a big payoff for most good board games that have remained worth their salt – the element of satisfaction.
Excelling in scalability, Agricola works fabulously from solo play to large groups and everywhere in between. Indeed, the larger the group, the more one seems to appreciate the multitude of goodies this box has to offer and the various and dramatic ways they can be used to achieve victory over the competition. Agricola always keeps you on your toes and makes you think about what the best move might be. It’s not the kind of game where you can zone out or “fly on automatic.”-Rahdo Mutineer
In the end, the instructive side of Agricola is definitely something to talk about. It gives us a really interesting look into the kinds of things that people in the past used to do to live and be entertained. We have video games now, and board games, too. But we don’t usually think about how our ancestors from hundreds of years ago used to have fun—because they probably didn’t, right? Except for maybe the rich, who could afford to keep all kinds of animals for whatever reason. We certainly don’t think about the kinds of games that they used to play. But they did, in fact, used to play games. And those kinds of games turned out to be the prelude to the kinds of games that we play today.
