After many months of neglect, we recently played Agricola again with some friends of Chee Wee. It was notable not only because it was the first time we played the Family version of the game, without any of the Minor Improvement or Occupation cards, it was also the first time we played Agricola with the full five players. Some thoughts:
- I won the game, but only by the seat of my pants with 30 points. Choo finished at 28 points I think while Shan shared third place with Choo’s friend Justin. Still, it was embarrassing for us considering how many times Shan and I have played the game already. We had also grown used to scores in the 40-ish range, so dropping back down to the 30-ish range was humbling as well.
- Part of it must be due to omitting the Minor Improvement and Occupation cards, which can add a great deal of versatility and efficiency to your actions. But I’d say most of it is down to the vastly different dynamics of the five-player game. Food is scarce! High-efficiency actions are always hotly contested! Most of the extra actions added to the game to compensate for the extra players are poor in efficiency and are taken only as a last resort. By contrast, building materials aren’t too difficult to get and clay in particular was flowing out of my ears.
- As an example of what I mean, by the end of the game, not one player had elected to grow to five family members. The combination of too little food and the scarcity of good options to take with your extra actions meant no one wanted to take the risk. I had grown to four members much earlier than the other players but at the cost of not being able to build any sort of food engine at all. I’d actually built my house to five rooms, building one room early to grow to three members and building double rooms with a later actions, but I had such a hard time scrambling for food that I opted not to get the fifth family member.
- With no Minor Improvements in play, every single Major Improvement card was quickly bought up. I was very careful to buy up the first Fireplace and slaughtering all the early sheep went some way towards fulfilling my food needs for quite a while. Later, I supplemented my food needs with the Pottery card due to all the clay in the game. Justin was the baker in the game with his early Clay Oven. Actually he could have won the game easily but for his unfamiliarity with the mechanics. If he had optimized his actions better, using the sow action only when he had more than one field to sow for example, or buying the oven only when he already had a grain ready to be baked, he could have freed up a bunch more actions for other stuff.
- The most popular actions in the game were Take 1 Grain, Plow and later, Take 1 Vegetable. Later in the game, players routinely passed over nice stacks of wood or reed just to get the plow action. Consider that each player needs a minimum of three plowed fields by the end of the game and prefers more. With five players, that means a minimum of 15 plow actions without cards to speed things up. Plow and Sow turns up later to help out of course, but there are only two or three such actions in the game. Nice for whoever snags them but it’s far from enough to make up the slack. No wonder competition for that space was so fierce!
Probably the reason I won was because I was gamey about getting exactly one of every needed item and thus avoided getting any negative points, except for empty spaces. Everyone had empty spaces by the end of this game. I’m not even sure that aggressively growing early in this game, the conventional strategy in Agricola, helped me more than it hurt me. Sure, I got extra actions but I had to spend a bunch of them on low quality actions like grabbing two food just to avoid Begging cards. All in all, I was reminded again of how dynamic Agricola is and it’s a nice demonstration that even the family version makes for a pretty meaty game.
Leave a Reply