Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I’m not entirely sure if the Through the Seasons postcard expansion for Agricola is merely a collectible novelty or something that’s actually meant to be played. Judging by the paucity of posts on its little corner of BGG, it seems that most people think it’s the former. Being huge fans of the game however, my wife and I thought that it would be a shame not to give it a shot. Since playing it once wasn’t enough for me to form an informed opinion, we’ve ended up playing it three times so far.

The little postcard basically divides every round in Agricola into one of the four seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter and makes three types of changes to the round depending on the current season. First of all, it modifies the resources that are added onto the board at the beginning of the round. Winter for example, is particularly painful as it shows -1 Clay and -1 Reed, meaning no clay or reed will be added to the board at all. Autumn however gives +1 Wood and +1 Reed, so it’s a good season to grab resources in.

Secondly, it adds special conditions to specific actions that are taken in the round. Most of these effects are bonuses, so in Spring, you get two free Fences whenever you build Fences for example. Once again, Winter is the bad season as you need to pay 1 Food to take the plow action. Finally, each season also adds a action space that a family member can use. The additional action in Winter is the obvious powerhouse here as it is a Family Growth without room action at the cost of 2 Wood and 3 Food. Summer provides an interesting action called Holidays and gives you 1 Bonus Point for each family member already placed by the time you use it.

One obvious shortcoming is that the rules don’t clearly state which season you start the game in, though the little sheep in the space for Spring suggests that this is the intended start of the year. It should be noted that the choice of starting season will drastically change the flow of the game, especially for the first few rounds. For our games, we deliberately started in a different season each time to see how things worked out.

So what does it play like? Well, if you were getting bored of the stock game, I’d say this little postcard sure succeeds in mixing things up quite a bit. If you look at it, it’s rather obvious that on balance the postcard adds more resources and bonuses to the game so you should in theory be more secure and score more points at the end of the game. But in practice, if you’re already an Agricola veteran, Through the Seasons really throws you off your rhythm. In my first couple of games, I was so distracted by all the new options that I did far worse than usual. While it’s tempting to try to time your actions to take full advantage of the seasonal bonuses, it’s very difficult to actually pull if off since you’re perennially short of actions in this game.

It also serves to break up the scripted plays at the beginning of the game that you might be used to once you’re played Agricola several times. For example, in our two-player games, the first player always grabs 3 Wood and the second player always grabs Occupation, but what if there’s only 2 Wood at the beginning of the game? Or what if the game starts with 4 Wood and 2 Reed? Of course, to make this work you’d have to randomize the starting season each game and new scripts would emerge depending on which season you start in, but until everyone gets used to them, I think it would help make the beginning of the game a bit more dynamic.

I’m not sure however that this is an expansion that Agricola actually needs. The base game is rather complex already and adding Through the Seasons gives you even more to think about. Plus I’m also not sure that it’s properly balanced. Altering the resource distributions can sometimes really reduce the number of viable actions in a round and the new Family Growth action is game-changing in its power. Its expensive enough that you really need to plan for it and work towards it, but the possibility of getting an extra family member before the first harvest is too powerful to ignore. Guaranteeing early access to Vegetables is also quite a change and looks like it could give a big boost to Occupations and Minor Improvements that use Vegetables.

Overall, I’m going to go with playable novelty for this one. It’s quirky and interesting enough that it’s worth adding to the game once in a while, but I’ll still play most of my Agricola sessions without it. I think it adds chaos to what is supposed to be a very methodical, highly structured game and I don’t like how dominating the new Family Growth option is. Both my wife and I are pretty competitive Agricola players these days and we take our scores seriously. I can see how using Through the Seasons too much would throw a wrench in the works, make it difficult to develop serious strategies for the game and make it next to impossible to fairly compare scores across sessions.