I've had the opportunity to play this game six times now, two of them solo "full" games, once with two players "full", and four times with >two players "short." This review will focus primarily on my experience with the short game, but will include some (possibly less valid) comments about the longer game and Agricola comparisons as well.
Components
When you open the box, the first thing you realize is that, although it is the same size as the Agricola box, there is far less material in there (the price point is very different, so one cannot begrudge them this too much).
What is there isn't bad, but there's nothing particularly spectacular. Three game boards, a ton of chits in 8 different resource types (+ Francs), a "worker" and a boat in 5 different colors, and of course, the usual ton of cards.
The game boards are just about useless. This is a card game with chits, the boards are merely a distraction.
Rules/Gameplay
Since there haven't been many reviews, I'll rehash here a little.
On your turn, you generally do two things - fill up two offer spaces, and take a Main Action. You may take any Additional Actions at any time during your turn (as many as you would like). Your Main Action can be one of two things - take an offer pile or enter a building. It's not explicitly stated in the rulebook, but there are three buildings which are Start Buildings which you may enter to build more buildings. These other buildings give you more resources, let you refine resources, let you turn resources into money, or let you build a ship. Additional actions are Buying or Selling a building with/for Francs (different from building one) or paying off a loan. When you sell a building, you sell it to the Town for half the original value. After seven actions have occurred (in a 3-player game, 2 people will get 2 actions, 1 will get 3), there's an end of round phase. If you have 1 Grain or 2 Catttle, you gain an extra of the respective resource. You then owe Food, an amount which steadily increases as the game progresses. If you have a Ship, your food cost is reduced. After 12-20 rounds, whomever has the most money wins (buildings and ships are worth money).
I found the rulebook to be atrocious. I knew nothing of the game going in, and had to learn the rules. 629
The layout was remarkably bad, nothing was in an easy-to-locate place, and several sentences provided a great amount of confusion. Having major rules in the "Examples" side-bar is rather bad form. The standard building cards' ticks and “Start” are poorly designed and even more poorly explained. No one can figure out what you are supposed to do with the Full game, unless you look at the one specific thread on here where <PERSON> replies with the “official” ruling.
As far as how the game itself flows - there is a level of frustration present from needing to pay so much food so frequently. You're often focused on grabbing a ship every other round or so (or, I have been), and making yourself not use all of your main actions to simply get more food seems to be a major part of the game. I find the food aspect rather dull, actually. You can easily get all the food you need - enough for 3 rounds, and still you're presented with options to get more food remarkably easily. The problem is simply that it will be all you will do this entire round, if you choose to do it. And you don't get any points for food at the end (although unpaid loans seem pretty bad, but I've never seen anyone have even one).
Otherwise, you spend the majority of the game focusing on building/buying buildings. You will be procuring the necessary resources and occasionally refining them. The problem is, the focus here isn't very much on the refinement but rather on the gathering. So you'll need to grab 4 clay and 1 wood in order to build one building. But you actually grabbed 4 clay and 4 wood. Now you have 3 wood leftover, and look, this building requires 3 wood and an iron. So you grab some iron and build *that* building. Of course, a good player is usually more efficient than this, planning ahead a bit better.
But there is a large amount of downtime from such calculations, primarily arising from scanning each of the 20 buildings scattered about the table (in front of their owners, or off to the side if the Town has built it) and figuring out your current status in each of the 8 different resources.
Why they couldn't have taken a note from the well-designed Caylus is beyond me - the buildings are all in a very central location, with very easy-to-see ownership markers upon them. 629