LogFAQs > #897652775

37. Agricola
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31260/agricola

Genre/mechanics: Worker placement, resource management
Rules complexity: 7/10
Game length: 60-150 minutes (30-40 minutes per player)
Player count: 2-5
Experience: 5+ plays with 2, 3, 5 (including app/online plays)
First played: 2015

Agricola is a workper placement game themed around subsistence farming. Each round, players take turns placing one worker at a time, drafting available actions - such as collecting wood, stone, reed, grain, or food; improving abilities using cards; getting animals and building fences for them; plowing and sowing fields; or growing your family and your house. Your farm is judged on its ability to achieve all of these objectives - and to feed your family consistently - after fourteen rounds.

Enjoyment - Man, I have a tortured relationship with this game. First off, I've never won. It should be noted I am terrible at complex strategy games such as Agricola. And then, the first time that I played this game, it was one of my first eurogames and with five players, with one incredibly analysis-paralysis-prone player (who sat away from me at this giant table). I didn't know people very well yet, I was doing by far the worst, and I was hungry. All I knew was that every time around the table, we'd be stuck for five minutes on someone's turn I could barely see, doing something called "baking bread" (an option not available to me, because I wasn't able to invest in an oven or grain, because my family was fucking starving). I'd have the shortest turns and the fewest, as I didn't grow my family much. Three and a half hours later, along with that first game of Catan, it was one of my formative, and worst, gaming experiences ever.

Since then I've played Agricola a handful of times, never with more than three players. The games haven't gone over two hours - perhaps not over 90 minutes if you don't count setup - and while I'm still garbage at the game, I've been able to see what's happening, look other players in the eye, and appreciate just how much I suck. I also learned what baking bread means. And... I don't know about fun, but I feel the pressure of working against the game.

Design - I have so much respect for how Agricola is designed. Part of me thinks it's Stockholm Syndrome. Action economy is tight, yet there are so many options per turn. If you lose it feels on you. The biggest pressure on a player is to feed your family, but the scoring rubric feels incredibly punishing. You didn't manage to build a shed? Take a negative point. You didn't have time to grow vegetables? Take a negative point. You had to eat all your sheep? Take a negative point. Essentially, everyone has to compete for every action, in order to stay afloat in the race. The game opens up later, as you get a bigger workforce and access to more powerful actions, but you don't ever get a chance to relax before the game ends. Agricola more or less exemplifies the way Ben Wyatt's Cones of Dunshire is described: "punishingly intricate."

The other cool part about Agricola is its theme. Subsistence farming isn't thrilling, but it's satisfying when everything kind of makes intuitive sense - animals bread, fields need to be plowed before they can be planted in; brick is required to build fireplaces or ovens; you need extra rooms to house extra workers. Don't fish for a while, and the fishing hole starts overflowing with fish to be caught. Though ho, ho, why can only one couple have sex in the village per year.

Replay - Yeah, I'd do it again. With no more than four. I can't help wanting to test myself again, even though I feel like I'll wind up hating myself again after two hours.

Bonus question - What games make you feel always on the edge because of the game, and not necessarily because of the player interaction?

Hint for #36 - It's the mouse!
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness