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Anthony Boydell
United Kingdom
Unspecified
Unspecified
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As if to herald the import of the day and guide me through it with joy, warmth and sense of ‘everything will be ok, the sun came out in Berkshire and all was right with the world.
A useful 2/3rds day of work was followed by a couple of hours of ‘free play’ time, so I popped into a nearby cinema and caught ‘SOURCE CODE’, the latest from Jake Gyllenhaal and Director Duncan Jones. As an enormous fan of the moody, melancholy sci-fi poem that is MOON, I had high expectations and I wasn’t disappointed: Groundhog Day meets 12 Monkeys! It was fantastic – and all those other versions of me in an infinite multiverse enjoyed it immensely too.
Come the evening, Richard and myself repaired to Carl’s dining room with the ever-attendant Ray and Iain, for a long-promised (but previously-thwarted) Agricola session! First, however, I had to overcome the worrisome, blank gazes of some of High Wycombe’s finest ‘yoot’ as I parked my car in the leafy residential street – there are few things more disconcerting than a ‘posse’* of threatening kidults giving you the once over – I felt like I was being MRI-ed for mobile devices and credit cards. Oh to be young again…
Ray had been overcome this week by a surfeit of good ideas and had come bearing our supper: a large bag of oven chips and ten delicious pies bought from Reading’s finest purveyor of pastry-encased sweetmeats: Sweeney Todds.
In order to ensure we all had a fair choice, we decided to initiate a ‘pie draft’ – each player, in rotation, selecting ONE comestible and passing left. It was a tense affair, do I take the Duck & Apricot or hate the Venison & Boar from Iain? Is it better to be mono, or two-flavour? Here’s how we ended up:
Iain: Venison & Boar + Steak & Ale (“Meaty Beats”**)
Carl: Steak & Ale + Steak & Ale (“Mono-Steak”)
Richard: Venison & Boar + Sweeney’s Special (“The Game Barber”)
Ray: Five Nations + Vicars Favourite (“Rugby Cleric”), and
Tony: Venison & Boar + Duck & Apricot (“the Birds and the Beasts”)
As it turned out, the pies were delicious and it was Agricola that left a bad taste in the mouth. Much merriment was promised as we laid out the boards, the –eeples, the Agricola X-Deck, the Agricola: The Legen*dairy Forest-Deck et al – there may have even been ‘giggling’ and ‘ banter’.
Things got off to a shaky start after the first Harvest when I took 2 Stone at the Stage 2 Quarry and drew ‘Rebel’ from the X deck – this meant I dropped from two family members to one (for action placement purposes). Not a terrible situation to be in as all I needed to do was build a room and grow (not a big problem in the 5-player)…that is, until I took three wood and drew ‘All Your Wood Are Belong To Us’ from the Fairy deck and I was staring down the barrel of one action per Round for the rest of the game!
Compounding this issue was Carl’s aggressive propensity to grab Starting Player at every opportunity – mainly because he gets seriously paranoid about us taking the actions he wants (because we DO)! I say this compounded the issue because on Round 5 he took four wood and revealed 'Lady Of The Sea' – this meant he would be Start Player for the rest of the game unless 'Lady Of The Sea' came out again…
…I am sat to Carl’s right…
…I have ONE action per round and I’m going to go LAST in every round…
Someone needed to keep an eye on the chips as they cooked: given I would have little to do over the next 90 minutes, it fell to me to oversee the baking - just not in the way I had originally foreseen at the start of this god-forsaken session!
Sneakily, I used the Winter action on the Through The Seasons board to get a second family member (Round 9) and began to salvage some kind of farmyard from the wreckage. I collected wood, without any further damage from the stupid bloody Legend*airy expansion, and was about to build a third room (again!) when Richard took Stone, drew ‘Beam Me Down, Welshie’ from the X-Deck and took all of our next turns for us; he put me on Fences, thus forcing me to ‘spend’ my room wood in favour of a couple of bloody pastures!
*heavy sigh*
Game end saw Iain romping away with 50pts (courtesy of being 2nd for most of the game), Ray in second with 48 (he should’ve won – he was working the hardest, and in the most ‘traditional’ manner), Richard with 43 (a 7 room stone house with some pigs and cows – a proper Adobe on his Wild West board), Carl pulling in 4th with 39 (stealing the Stone Oven that should’ve come to ME) and me trailing waaaaay behind, on 27 with 2 family members, Luke bleedin’ Skywalker and a trio of Fairies dancing around my board (a little too joyously for my liking):
I let that lot pack everything up – after all, I was a glorified witness in a 4 player game. On the bright side, I’m quite pleased I managed to salvage 27 points from the relentless testicle-kicking that this game seemed to serve – and we won’t play with these decks again for a LONG time and, when all is said and done, it’s still a game of Agricola for which I am always, always grateful!
We rounded off the evening with Acquire – my first ever play of this throwback – and I enjoyed it very much. It’s retro-look belied it’s area-control strategies – one to play again in the near future.
I believe the venerable Bard was correct when he said: 'Bollocks'.
Tararra-bit.
*Cowboy is captured by Red Indians and buried in the desert soil on the outskirts of the village. His horse is tethered near-by, spoils of his capture, but it is an intelligent horse: the equine equivalent of Lassie! The cowboy whistles and the horse shakes loose from its moorings and trots over to the beleaguered tobacco-chewer – it bends it head close to the ground and the cowboy whispers in its ear. The horse gallops off into the sunset. The next day, his captors are much enraged at a) the loss of the beast and b) the ominous cloud of dust moving towards them on the horizon! There is the rumbling of many hooves, there is shouting and hollering and, within a few minutes, a host of horses rides into the village. The dust clears to reveal twenty young women, in loose-fitting clothing, carrying make-up valises and blankets. “No, you stupid horse”, shouts the cowboy, “I said: Go and fetch the POSSE!”
**this is an ancient Magic: The Gathering players’ sous entendu and its always nice to get them out for people to see rather than keeping them hidden***
***this is just a bad sous entendu
****this is a recursive note****
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