In Agricola each player builds their own personal farm in front of them. You must choose how you develop your land while continuing to feed your family. At the end of the game each farm is scored on it’s strengths and diversity.
Basics
Plays: 1-5 players
Time: 30-40 minutes per player
Components
Lots!
I am pretty sure it weighs in at 2.2kg
9 boards
5 personal farm boards (many of these have other useful things on the back to be used if you have less than 5 players)
3 boards for the action cards
1 board for the Major Improvement cards
The boards are all thick and sturdy with colourful graphics on them
57 Tiles representing house rooms and fields. These are also very thick with cute and varied illustrations (e.g. scarecrows in some fields, different room tiles)
313 pieces of wood including family members, fences, wheat and vegetables, raw materials and animals. These are mostly abstract cubes and discs in a number of different colours but serve the purpose well. Unfortunately the colours of some of the raw materials do not match colours in the cards that well. An issue I understand will be fixed for the English language edition.
360 Cards
The majority of these are Occupations and Minor Improvements in ‘E’ (easy) ‘I’ (Interactive) and ‘K’ (complex) decks.
There are also some food markers and other tokens as well as a scoring pad for the end of the game.
Gameplay
Each player has their own Family Members (initially 2, represented by wooden discs) and their own Farm board. In the centre of the table are the Action boards on which Action cards are placed.
The Action boards start with a certain number of preset actions on them. Each round a new card is added to the next space on the Action board. Then players take it in turns to place their family members on the Action boards, immediately taking the actions. Only one player can take each action, so if another player takes the action you wanted this can really mess with your plans. Once all players have placed their family members then the round finishes.
Harvest
Every few rounds a Harvest occurs. They occur more frequently as the game progresses.
During the harvest you get wheat or vegetables back that have grown in your field and animals you have reproduce. You must also feed your family members. 84
This is a key element of the game. Each family member requires 2 food, to start with this doesn’t sound that hard, but it is important to find efficient ways to generate food. You don’t want to spend all your actions generating food and leaving none for farm improvement.
Actions
So this is the heart of the game. I am going to describe some of the actions as this gives you a good idea of how the game works. As mentioned before a limited number are available at the start of the game and additional ones are added each round.
Get resources – wood, clay, stone, reeds, wheat, food and later in the game vegetables and animals. These actions are pretty self explanatory.
Building – build a new room to your house by paying the appropriate resources. This gives you space for more family members (see below) and also counts for final scoring.
Family Growth – add a new member to your family (provided you have space in your house). The plus side of this is you get one extra action, and VPs at the end. The downside is that you have one more mouth to feed.
Minor Improvement – this allows you to pay the appropriate resources and bring a minor improvement card into play from your hand. More on these cards later.
Occupation – This allows you to bring an Occuaption cards (also covered below) card into play from your hand. These cost food and with food being scarce you cant play them as often as you would like.
Plough – This ploughs one of the squares on your board and makes it ready for planting
Sow – this allows you to take wheat or veg from your supply and plant it in your field. It then grows in that field (by adding more from the supply) and you get some back each harvest.
Fences – use wood to build fences on your board creating pastures to keep your animals in
Renovation – upgrade your house from wood to clay or clay to stone by paying the resources. The better your house the more it is worth at the end of the game.
Cards
These are another significant part of what makes Agricola, the Minor Improvements and Occupations. Every player starts with seven of each. The effect these have are too diverse to describe but can be things like; get extra resources for certain actions, bonus actions, bonus end game VPs for certain criteria, ways of generating food, allow you to break certain rules. 629