this weekend me, my girlfriend and another couple decided to go to our FLGS and play a round of agricola with the available demo version.
After reading the rules really fast, and just skipping the whole scoring part (we would see that when we arrived at the end of the game) we started playing. We all took 7 job cards and 7 minor improvement cards.
The first round was a bit chaotic : what does this action do exactly, what can I do with that? But eventually we got the hang of it and in the last rounds everything went real smooth. We all found it nice to having the round move pretty fast once you get to know the game a bit.
Now, what rules did we miss: we didn't know that you can only take 14 cards so whenever you played a card from your hand you could take a new one from the pile (not good as this would give the eventual winner some nice bonus cards, which he wouldn't have had otherwise). But now I've realized our mistake and it will not happen anymore.
Another mistake we made was allowing people to turn animals into food markers without them having the correct improvements, we noticed this too late in the game to change it back, so we just kept playing the wrong way. This made sure nobody ever needed a begging card.
Eventually we made it to the end and we started scoring: oops we hadn't read that before starting. We didn't know there was a maximum number of points for everything and neither did we know that you could get negative points, major woopsies

Eventually it was a tight score between me and my friend: 30 vs 32, our girlfriends had 18 and 19 points.
Anyway, in the end we liked the game and we will play it again soon (the primary reason for us to go and play the demo version was for my girlfriend to see if we liked the game enough so she could buy it for my birthday
), with the correct rules of course 
I gave the game a 9 rating, we'll see how that evolves after some decent plays

Best Regards,
Peter
PS: as usual I apologize for any spelling or grammatical mistakes, English isn't my mother tongue.
Last edited on 2008-12-04 04:01:21 CST (Total Number of Edits: 2)
































