If you are at all aware of the board gaming hobby, online discussion of it, and the titles that generate a little excitement and maybe a couple of thousand sales before practically disappearing as the ravenously consumerist proponents of the hobby move on to the Next Big Thing then you’ve undoubtedly seen or heard somebody talking about AGRICOLA. Don’t blink or you’ll miss the excitement. After next month’s Essen festival, there will almost certainly be a new hot Eurogame that supersedes it as the “best game ever”.
Since its release at Essen 2007, AGRICOLA has become about as close to a blockbuster phenomenon as the tiny, niche-market hobby boardgaming industry can generate. Early adopters imported the game in its native German language production and meticulously pasted up copies with homemade English translations. AGRICOLA was “the” game to play for hobbyists throughout 2008, particularly for Eurogame enthusiasts who were already declaring the game a successor to PUERTO RICO and sliced bread, in that order, before the game was even available to more than just a handful of gamers outside of Europe.
So AGRICOLA, the farming game to end all farming games, has finally made it to the US with all 360 cards (and then some) translated into English and with a $70 price tag. After all the hype, the counter-hype, all the online bantering about it, and all the “best game evar”/ “this game sux”-style rhetoric what is left is the game itself. I sort of avoided AGRICOLA since its release, watching on the sidelines both the idiocy of the hype-mongers who were busy modeling carrots and sheep out of clay to replace the included pieces as well as the vehement assumptions made by many gamers who had not played the game that it would be just another Eurogame with a boring, useless theme (17th century European farming), no interaction, and the endless, repeated shuffling of wooden cubes. I wanted to play the game on its own terms and to give it a chance to just be a game instead of either a Messianic incursion of divinity into the presence of mortals or the antithesis of all that is good and right about board gaming.
So I bought a copy and when I finally got it in my hands the first thing that struck me is how freaking ugly the game is. Crude, amateurish, computer-shaded line drawing art and a muddy, dreary color pallet that I guess is supposed to evoke the world of farming in 17th century Europe- appropriate to the theme I guess, but my first impression wasn’t a very good one. Opening the box I was impressed by the piles and piles of cards (more than some Fantasy Flight Games come with) but the abundance of typical, generic, and practically interchangeable bits as are usually found in Eurogames quickly undermined any good impressions I had.
I guess most Eurogamers feel like wooden cubes and discs impart a handmade, “olde worlde charme” to a game but I find myself wondering if any of these people are aware that such components are available in bulk at any craft store-you don’t have to buy a $70 board game to get them. Nine extremely boring-looking, very green heavy cardstock boards and a couple of counters representing farmhouses, food, and fields rounded out a pretty uninteresting package. I was already wondering if I had wasted my money on another CAYLUS.
The rulebook was fairly easy to get through and made sense- but again, I found myself almost nauseated that I had spent so much money on yet another game where the goal is to turn cubes of one color into cubes of another color with an arbitrary scoring mechanic at the end to determine who followed the rules the most efficiently. The game hinges on a worker placement mechanic, whereby players have a limited number of workers (here represented by discs that are somehow supposed to be “family members”) that are placed on various available actions. When an action is claimed, no one else can choose it for the rest of the round, thus generating a false sense of player interaction and passive-aggressive competition.
Players are tasked with starting and operating a farm sometime after the Black Plague. You’d never really know that since this the game portrays the period as apparently the easiest time farmers have ever had—crops always come in, the weather always cooperates, and livestock never falls ill. Each round players alternate placing family members on the available actions which range from gathering resources with which to build facilities and improvements to seeding and plowing fields to having babies (thus increasing the number of actions possible each round. At the end of some rounds is a harvest phase in which players must feed their families by providing two food for each— grain can be baked into bread with the appropriate oven improvements, livestock can be cooked with the proper equipment, and somehow wood can be made into food if the player possesses a joinery. So there definitely is some of the dreaded wooden cube transmutation going on. Any shortage means not that the family member starves, but that a penalizing “Begging” card has to be taken.
Throughout the game, the tactical goal is almost always to keep the family fed and avoid taking the withering penalties of begging while also increasing the output of the farm, building fences and stables to house livestock, and expanding and renovating the farmhouse when you have an opportunity and resources to do so. Each player has an individual 3x5 grid that represents their claim, but geography and proximity is not an issue in the game at all. Everything you plant, build, or produce nets points at the end of the game in a convoluted system that more or less gauges how diversified and well-developed each farm has become. Unfilled farm spaces get negative points, as do farms that are missing one of the types of farmable crops or animals. Having more of a particular crop or animal gets you more points and having a house upgraded all the way up to stone generates a higher score. I almost feel like the game should just chuck the scoring system out altogether; I’d rather see players eliminated when they can’t produce enough food for their families and the winner is the last farm still standing. At least then it would feel competitive.
