Review: Agricola

Last Thursday, when the board game Agricola was released in the U.S. with the English rules translation a very significant thing happened. For the first time in many years, a new title became the highest rated board game of all time. Now these ratings are based on the website Boardgamegeek.com. Over 2000 people rated Agricola and based on its average score, it overtook Puerto Rico as the highest rated game. To people who follow the board game industry, this is a very big deal. For years Puerto Rico was looked at as the epitome of perfection and now a new champ had been crowned.

Personally I have been waiting nearly a year for this game to be translated and released in the United States. It was a wait plagued by delays and unbearable anticipation. Starting in June I started saving my pennies, skipping lunch on Fridays so I could put money away to buy this monster. Even with my 30% discount from the store, I was going to need $50.00+ to pay for this game and I intended to have it the first day it was released. Well, Thursday I got my copy.

Let me explain a little bit about the board games I tend to favor. I like imported games (many of the best are conceived and released first in Germany) and most of the top games on the BGG list are from Europe. Agricola is one of those. The Euros (as they are typically known) are generally based on strategy and not luck. There is very little randomness and often times requires the players to manage multiple aspects of the game at one time. Additionally Euros tend to reduce the amount of direct conflict you experience with other players. In opposition, American games generally use a lot of dice, are linear (roll, move, do what the space on the board tells you to) and have much more conflict (think games like Monopoly where you are taking other player's money or Sorry where you are sending your opponent's pieces back to their starting areas). Euros are very cerebral and take great deal of thought and pre-planning. They require you to look a bit into the future and determine the course of action you are going to take. Finally, Euro games tend to be extremely high quality with wooden (as opposed to plastic) pieces, heavy card stock and beautifully rendered artwork on the boards.

Agricola (pronounced Ah-GREEK-ola) is a prototypical European game. It has tons (100s) of wooden playing pieces in multiple colors. There are more than 300 cards with individual artwork on each card. Additionally it comes with multiple boards that are configured to form the main game board (with individual player boards to track your own progress). The gamer is stunningly beautiful and the quality makes it well worth it's $70.00 retail.

Agricola is basically a game about being a farmer in the 1700s. You start the game as a humble farmer and his/her spouse, with a plot of land and a two room wooden hut. The object of the game is to build up your farmstead, bringing prosperity to your family while struggling at times just to feed them. Each turn you get to take one action per family member. These actions range from plowing fields, building livestock pens, chopping down trees for wood, building on to your house, sowing your fields, or even fishing. As the game progresses you can expand your family, having up to 3 children who can then be put to work through to performance of additional actions. The caveat there is the fact that you have to feed each of your family members or resort to begging for food if you can't put the chow on the table. Furthermore, the only way you can have children is by adding on to you house, which requires more wood, reed (for the roof) or even clay or stone if you choose to upgrade your humble abode.

The game is about balance. It is also about understanding what you want to do and concentrating on that plan. While there is no direct conflict, there are opportunities to screw your neighbors by taking resources they had planned on utilizing. There are many different ways to win, be it by becoming a rancher and filling your pastures with sheep, cows and wild boar, or planting your fields and harvesting grain, afterwards sending it to the ovens to be converted to bread.

The game itself is won based on victory points accumulated by the expansion of your homestead. Each head of cattle, each planted field, each unit of grain or vegetables, each family member, even each room in your house counts towards the victory conditions. Failure to upgrade or fill you fields, or raise particular animals results in penalties that lower your score, so spreading yourself out and diversifying in the name of the game.

Agricola is very complex in what you can do, but fairly easy to learn. My first game was a disaster, as I was so preoccupied with feeding my family that I never properly built the infrastructure to do so consistently. I would sooner send my farmer to the fishing hole to catch dinner than send him to the field to plant grain that would continue to produce food long after I decided to ignore it.

Agricola is a learning experience. It is intense and enjoyable at the same time. There is a certain amount of initial frustration that goes into trying to get your food machine running, then a varying degree of frustration that comes with trying to expand you farm without out growing your food production capabilities.

Overall Agricola is simply brilliant. There are certain aspects of Puerto Rico and Caylus present in the game. There is a bit more luck involved in Agricola (the cards do this but also means that no game will ever be the same, something Puerto Rico and Caylus can't always claim). The game flows well with very little player downtime. Even with some downtime, most of it is utilized trying to figure out what your next step it. The game zips by in a hurry, but not so much as to seem frenzied.

I would recommend Agricola to anyone who has played some of the heavier hitting Euros (Puerto Rico, Caylus, Powergrid, or Goa). I would recommend it to others as well, but not without first playing it with someone who has had access to it previously. The rules can come off as complicated and the shear mass of pieces and cards can be quite intimidating. The game however starts to take off immediately and it isn't difficult to understand why this games, above all others has assumed the title of King of Boardgames.

Questions and comments are always encouraged.