Soooooo... a lot of people have been saying that you can call the game after seeing starting hands, or that after playing and looking at starting hands you can easily tell that the winner had the superior hand.

Well, let's find out. I played today, and I'll post our starting hands as a poll; vote for which one you think is the winner. Unfortunately, this will be too small a sample to learn anything useful from, so all of you who are obsessive enough (like me), please do likewise: post your starting hands in a reply to this forum and then send me a geekmail saying who the winner was and any other notes (for example if one player was much more experienced than others, etc). If enough people participate, we can really learn something.

Okay, here are the starting hands:

I have to laugh at the current tie, 4-4.

Anyone who can answer the above question without some serious digging through the Agricola rules should probably leave the game alone for a while and go get some fresh air..

Who's been saying that? I think the consensus is that hands can give
you an edge but good play beats a good hand.

I'm with Branko - if you expect more than a few people to reply, post the card texts, or a summary.

I think both won or lost (they each had the same amount of points)

I agree, but I didn't want to type out every card. I couldn't find just a normal card list in the files section, and so I was just hoping someone else would know of one and post it...

And creepier yet, as I was the 34th person to vote, and the score was tied at 17-17.

I have to agree with the previous poster that this game is more about strategy (strategery) than it is about the cards themselves. I think the strategic skill set for a good player vs. a bad player is how to best utilize the cards that you have.

Let's take another game - say, Magic: The Gathering. I played that quite a while in its initial stages (1994 to 1998). Without a doubt, the best overall Magic players weren't the ones with the $1,500 decks with 5 Moxes, a Time Walk, and a Lotus (although it certainly helped). I found that the best overall Magic players were those who could win a draft game after game after game. They knew exactly what to do with the random assortment of cards that were thrown at them because their skill set was based on best utilizing what they got.

Agricola uses that same type of strategic skill set. How good can you be with a set of 14 different cards? I think the answers to this poll prove that the good players are good regardless of what comes their way.

What I like about Agricola so much is that you don't HAVE to play the cards, if you don't want to. You get points for having a larger, upgraded house, having fields and pastures, building stables, having children, and planting crops. None of those actions actually require you to have a card in play! If you get 14 crappy cards, so what - you can still do everything you need to do to score points without having to play any of them. (Plus, all of the Major Improvements have points, so the community cards are just as valuable as the private cards).

Wow, 18 to 17 now. I guess even if you can call a game by the cards, you can't call a game by these cards.

Presently the vote is 23 to 22, with the first hand receiving 23 votes. I may be invalidating the results by giving extra information here, which is why I mention the current total.

Not only was there a winner, the end score for this game was 20 to 49. I won't say which hand was mine, but I received the 49 points. It was my 7th game, and my opponent's 2nd, so that accounts for quite a bit of it, but after the game I considered all that I've read in the forums about cards recently, and I really felt like I might have won because my hand was far too powerful.

This poll, although not disproving me, gives me good reason to doubt that that was anything other than confirmation bias. I feel confident now in saying that those who claim the cards are completely unbalanced have the burden of proof squarely on their shoulders.

I'd still like others to post polls of their starting hands, since this isn't enough data to draw a really solid conclusion from.

The question is how much experience did people have when they voted, and did they even take the trouble to take out all the cards and read them. For me, I did find all the cards (they are all in the K deck) and read them all. But I wasn't familiar with most of the cards since I have been playing primarily with the E deck. But it seems to me that the Wet Nurse is such a nice card that unless you have a super combo, it will be hard to compete. And that deal also had the Animal Tamer which combos well with the Wet Nurse. But maybe I shouldn't have voted since I really have not played with any of the cards.

It would be interesting to have other players play the same hand and see the resulting scores.

I think only rarely is a hand so good that it can beat good strategy. One game comes to mind where another player had Chief, chief's daughter, reeve, and half timbered house or maybe it was mansion. In any case, when you get nearly 6 points per stone room in your house, and have a couple of good food bonus cards, you can win with only 1 cow, 1 pig, 1 sheep, 1 vegetable, and no stables. Fortunately, this has only happened in one game I have been involved in or watched.

The best negative review available makes a strong claim that a better hand determines the winner of game among similarly skilled players.

Current score: 26-26...

I didn't vote as I've no clue what most of those cards do, but it's interesting to see how perfectly divided the votes are.

I've had games where I've only played 2 or 3 cards and won. I've had games where I played 9 or 10 and won.

The prescence of cards which form a coherent strategy shouldn't derail your strategy. I take the absence of so-called "good" cards as just another factor in how I proceed with the game. Just like you don't always have access to the building materials when you need them or access to certain actions when you need them, cards are just another commodity that you either have to focus on employing or learning to work around.

There's not one killer hand and there's not one useless hand. They have varying degrees of effectiveness AND that value of effectiveness is dependent on the skill of the players, the skill of the opponents, and the order in which they are played.

Good occupations and minor improvements do affect the outcome of the game. They just don't affect it as much as people would like to believe.

As the folks at Avonlea like to say, "It's a poor workman who blames his tools."

I used just one card to make my call - the brewery. Every time I've had that thing, I've done quite well.

I think this experiment and poll is a VERY GOOD idea, but the options given (just 2!!) does not lead to an insightful result in any case. If you just have two options, it's rather a gamble which of the options gets most votes. A much better approach would be to give us 5 hands to choose from! This way you really could say something on how people manage to see the winner just by viewing his hand of cards.

- we have the game since last november (over 9 months now) and it's our most often played game since then (usually 3 players, sometimes 4); in the first months we played it 3-4 times a week.

- the other players include always my wife, who is not a great player but quite o.k. and often my brother, who has the same gaming history that i have and he is a good player (usually he takes a bit longer than i do to understand a game but then our victory ratings are similar)

- i still win at least 90 % of our agricola games, usually leading by at least 20 % (i rarely have below 50 points while the 2nd usually is in the low 40s)

- this leads to the conclusion that good gameplay matters much more than the cards

BUT we also think the cards are very important. therefore we (now) deal 10 cards each instead of 7, but allow everyone to play only 7 of them. also we mixed the 3 decks together and then took all unbalanced cards out of the game - so now we have a greatly reduced luck factor (note: my victory rating was the same before we switched to this rules)

How about the session report http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/341993

Done. See thread http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/344752

A second poll has been posted, so I'll go ahead and let you know who won.

I had the first hand, and I won by a lot. At the time of this comment, the votes were 36 for the first hand and 41 for the second.

I got on this late, but noticed the wet nurse in hand one, which got my vote immediately.

Just saying you won doesn't add a lot of knowledge. Can you comment on what happened to make the score so extreme? Which cards did you and your opponent play? What do you think you did correctly or they did incorrectly? Etc.

Charles

Wet Nurse is great, but I am also a big fan of Schnapps Distiller. Veggies are Good Eats if you can get them. Greehouse can get you the early veggies you need to get this going.

The Plowman is an underrated card, but it saves you 2 actions, or generates 5 net points, depending on how you prefer to analyze it. Between that and Ox Team, I imagine he had quite a few fields and lots of veggies.

I think you're right. It was too long ago now for me to remember the details. I'm 100% sure I played both the Wet Nurse and the Schnapps Distiller. The others I'm not sure about.