Knights of the Cardboard Castle

My wife and I have played about half a dozen games of Agricola now and I think it’s safe to say that we’re still barely scratching the surface of what it can offer. Despite an intimidating array of boards, cards and small wooden bits, the game at its heart has a very straightforward mechanic and a very easy to understand theme.

Each player takes control of a family of farmers, starting with just a husband and wife, and must guide them towards a prosperous future. Playing through a fixed number of rounds, every turn each player gets a number of actions directly equal to how many family members they have. At the end, victory is determined by awarding points according how wealthy and successful each player’s farm is.

I say it’s straightforward because the main board is essentially no more than a collection of the actions available at any given moment. You simply place a family member token on an action space, execute the associated action and then it’s the next player’s turn. Once all players have assigned all of their family members to one task or another, all tokens are returned home and a new round starts. This is also when resources are refilled and the round card denoting a newly available action is uncovered.

Some of these actions simply involve collecting the resources that are available on the space, wood or clay for example. Others involve spending resources to obtain specific things, for example paying 5 wood and 2 reed to build an additional room to add to your house. Yet others aren’t as intuitive but are just as important, placing a token on the family growth space to obtain a new family member for example, or on an occupation space to play the appropriate card.

In addition to the main boards, each player has a board representing his or her farm. This starts with just two wooden rooms but a successful farm will eventually use up all of the available space for additional rooms, plowed fields for crops and fenced pastures for animals. The player’s available resources including the all important food supply are stored on this board as well.

Food is crucial because at the end of every round that is marked with the “Harvest” keyword, all players must scrounge for enough food to feed their family. Failure to do so penalizes the player with “Begging” cards that deduct points from the total at the end of the game. Not only is the penalty large enough to more or less determine a victory or loss all by itself, but thematically it’s also pretty humiliating to have one of your poor family members go hungry and have to go begging.

Finally, some randomness is introduced by distributing a hand of Occupation and Minor Improvement cards to each player at the beginning of the game. This makes every game of Agricola different as the cards are so game-changing in their significance that you’ll want to base your entire strategy around which cards you get. In our most recent game, I played the Hedgekeeper occupation card which allowed me to build fences early, allowing me to accumulate a huge herd of animals while my wife played a card that allowed her to renovate her wooden hut directly into a stone house, skipping the clay stage.

The second reason why Agricola is so dynamic is that having different numbers of players not only adds to the mix of Occupation cards that are in play but also drastically alters the action spaces that are available. This means that resources can be more or less valuable depending on how many players are in a game. I’ve found that wood for example is critically important in a two-player game while stones tend to pile up in the appropriate spaces because they’re so rarely taken.

One of the criticisms that I’ve often heard about Agricola is that despite the allure of multiple paths to success, it’s really a game that rewards being a generalist and penalizes players who try to over-specialize. Depending on the cards you draw, it’s possible to rely more on a particular aspect, such as farming or playing valuable Minor Improvement cards for your points, but the scoring system will still oblige you to dabble at least a bit in everything.

This was a point of view that I was initially sympathetic towards but now I find the emphasis on being a generalist to be a good thing as it increases the interaction and competition between players. Allowing each player to develop his farm in an independent direction using resource types that other players are neglecting would probably make it too much of a solitaire game. As designed Agricola is intensely competitive because all players tend to want the same things so you often find yourself looking over your opponents’ farms and their available resources to see if they’re going to block you from doing the things that you want.

This makes our Agricola sessions surprisingly tense affairs, something you might not expect in an economic game. The unforgiving nature of the feeding mechanic makes every harvest something to be dreaded, making the game even more exciting. The best measure of how good the game is however is that we come away from every session with the feeling that we’ve learned something and that we can do better next time. Even though the cards introduce a fair amount of luck, the fates of our farming families feel solidly to be in our own hands rather than left to the capricious whims of fortune.

In all fairness, Agricola is not at its best in the two-player format. This not only restricts the pool of Occupation cards to a small subset of all of the possibilities on offer, it also renders some choices strategically moot. For example, I’ve found that there’s almost no point in trying to bake bread in a two-player game as there are more than enough animals available. This means that if one of the players forgoes taking them, the other player would very easily amass huge herds with little effort.

Still, with three separate decks of Occupation cards to go through and with plenty yet to learn and refine, I suspect that Agricola will be hitting our table fairly often. Both of us would dearly love to play it with more people however. As far as I’m concerned this game fully deserves its place on the number one spot in the BGG rankings. It’s deep, involves plenty of strategically interesting decisions, has tremendous replayability and it’s just plain fun to see your own farm grow and thrive.