Knights of the Cardboard Castle

As a life-long PC gamer, I don’t quite yet know what to make of expansions for boardgames. Things are pretty simple with video game expansions. You basically get more of the same thing: more quests, more maps, more items, more units, more everything. They’re for people who liked the original and couldn’t get enough of it. And once you get an expansion, you always play with it. Always.

Some boardgame expansions work like this. Race for the Galaxy is a good example. Each expansion adds new cards and some new rules, but don’t change the game significantly. And once you get an expansion, there’s no reason to play without it. It would actually be quite troublesome to remove the additional cards. But you also have things like the Power and Glory expansion for Thurn & Taxis. It adds a new map and new rules for that map but ends up actually using very few of the components from the original game. It’s certainly an either-or expansion instead of an always-on one. You use it as an alternative to the base game, not to supplement it. Intrigue and King for El Grande is a similar case and I’ve heard people say that it changes the game so much that it’s almost a different one.

Then you have Farmers of the Moor for Agricola. It introduces a lot of new components but you still need all of the original stuff from the base game to play it. While it leaves the core gameplay intact, it also adds enough new rules and options that the game feels significantly different. You’ll certainly need to reevaluate all of your old habits and strategies for this on. While I don’t see it winning any converts for the game, I think some existing fans might be turned off.

Rather than describe the whole thing, I’d just write down some of my thoughts. Keep in mind that we only played the Level 2 version without any Occupations.

• As the rulebook indicates and our experience confirms, the Level 2 version is roughly comparable to the original game in terms of complexity and play time. This means that the Level 3 version is going to be significantly longer. As much as I like Agricola, I don’t think it needs to be even more complex or take longer to play. According to what I’ve read on BGG however, Level 2 is considered as the real game while Level 3 is considered a variant that hasn’t been fully developed and playtested.
• Horses dramatically change the scoring dynamic. Theoretically, someone could pursue horses to the detriment of almost everything else and still win. Since Agricola is rather well known for the constraint of requiring a well balanced farm, this is something that seasoned players might come to resent.
• The Special Actions are very, very interesting. Most obviously, they reduce the relative value of being first player and I think that’s a very good change. However, they’re also the main reason why the game will take longer to play now.
• Similarly, the heating requirement reduces the pressure on players to race for more rooms and consequent family growth. It also makes early renovation more viable. Both are good changes.
• I honestly don’t see the point of having randomized layouts for the forest and moor tiles on each player’s farms. Surely it’s easy enough to work your way around any of the possible configurations, rendering this make-work with little gameplay value? Plus it adds an additional component that is not used for anything except setting up the game, which I find annoying.
• Lack of Occupations in the Level 2 version means a bit less variation between what each player can do. I think that player an Occupation used to be a tough choice that is now absent in this version as this was always a separate action. Minor and Major Improvement cards can be more easily played as you can tack them on to another action and you can now even play them as a Special Action in this expansion, albeit at a cost.
• Some of the new Minor Improvement cards seem much more useful than others. This is a perennial complaint about Agricola, but the more I play this game, the more sensitive I become about balance issues. Surely Uwe Rosenberg should have taken note of all the complaints and took extra care to make sure the cards are balanced now? What’s the point of boasting about the replayability afforded by having so many cards when so many are just deadweight when you draw them? I’d have preferred a smaller set of cards if it meant that all cards are more or less equal in power.

I’m sure my wife and I will eventually get a copy of this expansion, but for the reasons listed above, I don’t think I’d always play Agricola with it enabled. This feels more like an expansion that introduces a variant of the base game to me so it doesn’t make the original obsolete. While I like many of the new stuff, I don’t think that the variant is appreciably better than the original. I’d say that each version has its own charms and I’d be happy to play either one.