In the immediate aftermath of Essen’07, quite a buzz has developed about this game of farming, and by now, there are a couple of reviews that all extol on its many virtues. Rather than just adding my voice to the chorus, I’d like to try and have a closer look at what makes it work so well. This closer look is from a somewhat limited perspective, since the majority of my games so far – 12 out of 15 – have been with two players only. Nevertheless, there will be some words on scaling and balance with more players, but keep in mind that these are based on extrapolation, mostly.

Thus, rating Agricola (in accord with my fellow reviewers) as an extremely entertaining, continually challenging and enormously variable game is not the conclusion of this review, but rather its starting point. To find out how it succeeds so well, we’ll look at the basic game engine first (albeit without detailing all those rules once more), and then see what the Occupations and Acquisitions add to that.

From Rags to Riches in Seventeen Easy Steps

A single round in Agricola consists of each of your family members – just Mum and Dad at the start – to do something useful with his time and pick one of the many available action spaces: getting resources, plowing a field, learning a new Occupation or something else. And there’s quite a lot of something else: apart from the 10 fixed choices available from the start in the two-player game, each game round will add another possibility.

What is remarkable about these actions is that – unlike you might expect from a Euro game - they are not very abstracted, but rather definite and incremental steps towards a goal. Say, for example, that you’d like to bake some bread. The normal detail level of a development game would break your way towards bread into two or possibly three actions: plant some grains, wait for harvest, build an oven and presto, there’s your bread. How does this play out in Agricola, you ask? Here’s how, and keep in mind that each of these steps will cost your one of your initially two actions per round:

To start, you’ll need some grain to seed, and getting that one bushel of grain is an action all by itself. Then you have to plow a field. And plant those seeds, which multiplies your sole bushel into thrice as much. While waiting for harvest time (which, in a turn of good fortune, does not require an action but comes all by itself), you can start on your oven, which requires a bit of stone and a lot of clay. And an action to build it. And just when you thought you were done, you need another action to actually bake that bread. Grand total: seven actions, and though you could bypass planting those seeds and bake them directly, you can probably see why my farmer family tends to chew on unbaked corn during their first winter.

While this amount of detail might read as somewhat tedious, it actually plays like a breeze, and I guess that the details are more help than hindrance: since each individual action is so limited, it is also self-explanatory and very easy to carry out. In other words, the more abstraction you have, the more game stuff gets between the theme and what you actually do during play. Agricola is extremely faithful with its theme, and although you will be very glad that you’re not actually a farmer in the 17th century, the ride from a lowly wooden hut to a nice, well-rounded farm is surprisingly fun.

So Agricola works well as a simulation of running a farm, which still means it could fail abysmally at being a good game. It doesn’t, however, and the level of detail actually helps here, too. One of the possible pitfalls of the action selection mechanism employed in Agricola and elsewhere (e.g. Caylus or Die Säulen der Erde) is that the starting player can monopolize a valuable action and thereby deny one strategic to everybody else. That won’t happen in Agricola, since the actions are not only detailed but also mostly non-linear: if you’d like to embark on the long journey towards baked bread, but somebody else already plowed a field this round, this will, at worst, only hinder you. Just take some grain and shop around for that stone you’re going to need for that oven, and when he gets some grain next round, that’s when you’ll plow your field. But unless everybody at the table is mad for bread, both of you will get there eventually.

Just as the actions needed to achieve one of your goals are non-linear, there are also no fixed uses for the many resources of the game, and again, this works very well as a balancing element. If, for example, your fellow farmer has built himself some nice fences while you don’t even have the wood to build them, he might think that all those sheep piling up on their action card (most resources in Agricola accumulate on their relative action spaces as long as nobody takes them) as practically already his, because why would you, without anywhere to keep them, use a valuable action just to spite him? And as long as you don’t have the wood and don’t use it to build some fences for yourself, he’s safe, right?

Not quite. Because if you happen to have some clay at hand, you can build a nice fireplace with a single action, and with your very next actions lead all those sheep to your place, using your new fireplace to make all of them into shish kebab for the long winter to come, maybe keeping one as a (probably somewhat nervous) pet. And since every resource in the game has at least one alternative use apart from what you mainly do with it, you can never rest on your laurels but watch out for the other players – they could always interfere with your surefire plans. Not to just spite you, which would usually be too costly a move, but because they have a different use for that wood you were sure to get. There are, in short, sheep and cow and wild pigs in Agricola, but there are no one-trick-ponies.

Somebody’s Got to Keep Score

I think what finally convinced me that Agricola is not just merely very good, but great, is a remark my wife made in the 14th and final round of the third game we played that day: “the one thing I don’t quite like is that during the last round, you start min-maxing your actions for victory points”. At the time, I just agreed that it was kind of a letdown, but when I thought about it later, I realized this implied that neither of us was thinking of the end score during the 13 rounds before. And the funny thing is, that’s exactly true – I don’t know a lot of other games where I get so predictably immersed, and apart from the detailed actions I dealt with above and the tremendously smooth development I’m going to talk about below, the intuitive scoring rules probably contribute a good deal to that quality.

Basically, the nicer your farm, the more points you get. That does, admittedly, not sound like a radically new concept of boardgame scoring, but what stands out here is how well the scoring rules reflect your estimation of what a nice farm should look like. Maybe it’s easier to explain with a counter-example: Goa is a game I love abjectly, but its level of abstraction and many sources of victory points mean you really need to add up all those points to see who did best. In Agricola, I’m usually able to tell the winner from a glance at the farm, unless it’s a really close game, and I could do that after playing four or five games.

The seemingly intricate scoring (you get points for your lifestock, grain, vegetables, renovated rooms of the house, number of kids ...) has only a few underlying rules that you learn by rote without even noticing, and that’s probably because they actually make some sense:
- diversity is good, so having nothing in a category gets penalized
- more good stuff gives more points
- overspecialization, however, is useless, so you get at most 4 points in one category
- unused farmland gets minus points
- family first; a large number of kids in a nice big house often makes up half of your total score
Additionally, your Acquisitions, especially the ten big ones available in every game, will give some points, but this just adds to the general feeling that the winning farm will also be the one that common sense, knowing nothing about victory points, would declare as the nicest and best-developed one.

All this would be enough to make Agricola one of my favorites of 2007 – trueness to theme, short and tense sessions, a good deal of seperate ways to win. But, as you probably know (because frankly, this not-really-a-review is rather unpalatable if you haven’t read one of the real reviews first), there is more. Three hundred and two more, to be exact.

Those Cards

Much has been made of the wealth of Acquisition and Occupation cards that Agricola offers, even to the point of calculating how many different setups of the game are possible to judge its replayability. This is certainly valuable information if you’re also willing to accept that Uno is practically infinitely replayable and that Chess can only be played once, or twice if you’re switching sides.

Although the sheer number of them is not a good yardstick to measure Agricola’s replayability, these cards do indeed elevate it to another level, but this is, to coin a phrase, not due to the size of its random variability but rather due to what it does with it. First, they are really variable. Apart from giving you some extra resources directly or over several rounds, there are a lot of cards that enhance some of the actions you can take and there are quite a few that give you extra victory points at the end. And then, above and beyond the already many ideas that you could maybe come up with yourself after playing a couple of times, there is a copious amount of wild stuff that expands on the basic game in other ways. As an example, the Shepherd Crook, an Acquisition you get for one wood, gives you 2 free sheep everytime you fence in a new pasture that is at least 4 spaces big.

And in a totally brilliant design decision, out of this humungous amount of different – sometimes very different – cards, you get 7 Occupations and 7 Acquisitions at the start of the game, and that’s it, that’s what you can learn and build in this farmer’s life. This restriction on a hand of 14 cards for each player achieves several things, and replayability is the least of them. Apart from condensing what would otherwise be a paralyzing amount of options into a managable set and thus making the game actually playable, it adds another and special kind of fun to Agricola beyond that of other development games: Hatching up the perfect plan based on your initial card hand, and then seeing that plan curl up and die during the actual game.

Which, at least for the second part, does not sound like that much fun, actually. But it is, as Joshua Miller testifies in better words than I could ever find: “The sadists weep because the masochists have all gone off to play Agricola, and who can blame them - being punched in the face never felt so good.” I can’t quite put my finger on why it should be so entertaining to see your best-laid plans crumble, but part of it is that while Agricola is a very demanding game, it is still very forgiving. Even if you don’t do well, or less well than the other players, you’ll end up with something that is a good sight better than the two-room wooden hovel you started with. And since the theming in this game works so exceptionally well, seeing your little farm grow bigger and better is all the more satisfying. Even if it grows in little steps, and not the leaps and bounds you imagined when you gazed at that apparently almighty hand you were dealt.

So, after more than a dozen plays, I can safely state that those cards add a whole amount of fun and, yes, variability to the game, especially since they make you try out new strategies that you would not have tried otherwise or which might even have been impossible to pull off without that very combo you were dealt. The word ‘combo’ does, however, beg the question whether they have the potential to unbalance the game. Based on my still limited experience – so far, we’ve not even cracked the third and final set of cards, but stuck with the ‘simple’ and the ‘interactive’ set – I’m pretty sure they do not, mostly for two reasons: careful development, which I’ll come back to at the end of this review, and the obvious and not so obvious costs of Acquisitions and, especially, Occupations.

Education’s All Nice and Fine, But You Can’t Eat them Books
To determine whether Occupations and Acquisitions can topple the game’s balance one needs to look at the power of the cards by themselves and the power of good card combinations. Regarding the former, something that gets forgotten or at least underestimated easily is the cost of playing one of these cards – one tends to look at their benefits only, which can make them seem rather powerful. This is less true for the Acqusitions, which can (and should) be purchased as an additional action with things like renovating your house or getting children, but it certainly is a big factor with Occupations, which will always cost you an action and, apart from the very first one, some food.

In the light of this, the straightforward Occupations are definitely not overpowered. Benefits like getting 1 wood during each of the next 5 rounds (Holzsammler) or getting a free stable everytime you build fences (Stalljunge) have to be compared with getting 3 or even 6+ wood right here, right now simply by choosing the Gathering Wood action or building stables for 2 wood each as an additional action when you enlarge your house. Most of the time, you can get the equivalent of two actions from an Occupation, so the net benefit is a single action gained. It’s more difficult to gauge with the more involved stuff, but from what we’ve seen so far, there has not been a single card that seemed unduly powerful and, just as important when it comes to balance, no card that seemed useless either.

But what about combos? For example, if I’m so lucky as to get not only the Stalljunge (1 free stable when building fences) but also the Heckenwart (3 additional fences when building fences), don’t things start to get out of hand? I don’t feel so, because such an obvious specialization will lead an awake opponent to block the Build Fences space whenever he can get some use out of it, and you need time (and at least one food) to set up that combo. And time, especially during the first rounds of the game, is at a premium.

While I’ve stated above that Agricola is a very forgiving game, there is one way that life on your little farm can get really uncomfortable, and the more you concentrate on getting Occupations, the more likely you are to go down that route. And I’m speaking from harsh experience here ... thing is, you have to provide food for your little family during each and every harvest, and where it gets tricky is that there are less and less rounds between harvesting: the first season lasts a generous four rounds, the second a still lenient three, and after that, it’s just two turns between harvests. Which means that you really want to have some means of producing food by the seventh round, because going hungry is a singularly bad idea in this game:

Each family member needs 2 food each harvest, and if you’re lacking, you’ll have to scrounge for food, which is unseemly behaviour and nets you –3 victory points for each unit of food you need. If you spend the first rounds to get some education and forget about setting up some kind of food production, it’ll be very hard to keep your family fed in the latter half of the game with only two turns between harvests. I was lured into that trap once by the apparently very powerful Hauslehrer Occupation, which will grant you a bonus victory point for all further Occupations you play. I got four or five points out of that, which did not make the –21 points I got from having to beg easier to swallow.

All in all, the effect your initial hand of cards is limited because unlike in a CCG, the cards do not define the game, but merely enrich it. Indeed, they hit that perfect pitch of delightfully shifting your basic strategies around a bit without totally overshading them. BattleLore achieved with almost all of its Lore cards (Chain Lightning and the Cleric terrain cards being the unhappy exceptions), and Agricola seems to do it even one better. Which leads us directly into the final part of this review.

A Well-developed Development game (and Some Words on Scaling)
Agricola exemplifies how good designs are elevated to greatness by thorough development. Although there are a couple of good or great new ideas – the limited choice of cards, the sweetening of the actions through accumulative resources – they are not enough to explain even half of the game’s addictiveness. What distinguishes it from other, lesser games is the loving care that has gone into it after the basic design was finished.

Even without the thank-you list of the 130+ playtesters, there are some very obvious signs of this carefulness: there’s a total of maybe three or four typos in the rules and on the cards and, what’s more, the cards and rules are so self-explaining and internally consistent that, after the initial game, I had to look into the rulebook exactly once. To find out that the combo I wanted to check worked just as I suspected it did. 300+ different cards is nice and well, but to me the more remarkable achievement is not having to wait for the 300+ errata that usually accompany such complex games.

Above and beyond these niceties, the outstanding development job has left its mark on the game itself. For such a complex game with so many things to do, Agricola plays incredibly smooth – both fast and, regarding each individual action, remarkably easy. One facet that exemplifies this quality are the resources: Agricola sure has a lot of them, but somehow this never feels as confusing as plain unnecessary as the mess that Cuba makes of this. Its probably due to well-defined and thematically fitting roles each one plays in the basic game engine:

Wood is the basic and most versatile building block, needed to extend your hovel and keep livestock around. Clay makes for a nicer hut and is necessary for all the big Acquisitions that allow you to prepare food (ovens and fireplaces). Stone is for the last step from hut to house and necessary for almost all serious Acquisitions. Animals provide food and victory points, with a distinct order of sheep, pigs and cows. Reeds are roofing material and thus almost exclusively needed for home improvement. Grain is a potentially awesome food generator, but you need the oven and some time to make bread out of it. Vegetables are the luxury food, worth so many victory points that I usually avoid eating them. And food, finally, is the fuel on which the whole engine runs, easily regarded as insignificant when abundant, but oh so valuable when you’re running out of it.

All of it intertwined in many ways, and nevertheless the game never feels fiddly once you get going. Set-up is a different story, and admittedly the one dud note that mars my praises of the game. Apart from setting up all the boards and piling the resources, you’ll have to sort out the cards needed for the number of players present, because that will change both the actions and the Occupations available in the game. Regarding the latter, you’ll also have to decide which of the sets you’re going to include, which might necessitate more sorting. This is definitely a better solution than writing 2-5 players on a game that will only reliably entertain 3 or 4, which is certainly not unheard of with these games of ours. But it is just as definitely a good deal less elegant than Knizia’s masterpieces, which often need only minute changes, or even none at all, to work nicely with any advertised number of players.

Elegant or not, the attention that has gone into dividing Occupations into sets suitable for 2, 3 or 4+ players is another testimony to careful development and a good sight better than creating a “two-player game” by creating a robotic third player. And the fact that you essentially have different games with a different number of players might alleviate the other nit I might find pickworthy in Agricola, namely that, with so many two-player games under our belts, we’d club new players like baby seals and thus turn them off this fantastic game.

I’m not so sure anymore that would happen, since the two player game has only the ten basic actions at the start of the game, with anything else coming up in the respective phases. So without a nifty Occupation or Acqusition, there’s no way at all to get stone before round 5, 6 or 7, and pigs and cows will enter the game even later. Even with just one more player, you can get 1 stone from the get-go, which may not seem much, but would be enough to build a clay oven for baking bread before the coming of the first winter. In the five-player game, you could even start herding cows in your first turn, which seems just mind-bogglingly early to our fragile two-player brains. Given that there are also some Occupations about that we don’t know yet (and that, of course, we’d use our experience in the game as a welcome excuse to foil each other’s plans wherever possible), we should manage to avoid scaring off any newbies.

And I’m certain that we’ll try to hoist this delicious addiction on as many of our friends as possible, because Agricola is not just the best farming game evar, but also the second-best reason for a gamer to learn german. For us germans, too - it’s not as though I knew what exactly a Kornschmuser does before playing the game ...

Thank you, thank you, thank you for such a wonderfully thorough review.

Thankyou so much for a truly enlightening and enjoyable review.


PS - Oh, Man! You're killing me - hoe much do I want to have a go! (Dare I order the German edition...or should I wait for the English release? I guess...as I'm awaiting the arrival of my ordered copy of Caylus Special Edition I ought to wait.)

Thanks for writing this great review. It really shows why this is a good game.

Thanks for an sharing this extremely well-written review! Agricola certainly seems to be wowing the masses left and right. Every few days, another review goes up that further confirms Agricola is for real.

Now I want to see a negative review. :evil:

What a wonderful article, Maik! This is one of the best game analyses I've ever read, not only because it's detailed and insightful (not to mention timely), but because it's written in a very entertaining style. Terrific job!

I'm glad you wrote at some length about whether the cards you are dealt could unbalance the game. Some of my friends got to play this at a con and they thought that a drafting mechanism needed to be added to even things out. I could see their point, but what you've said makes me even more prone to giving the rules as written a good long trial before we try any major surgery. As you've pointed out, the rest of the game is so well designed that it seems that an excellent designer like Rosenberg would have added something like that if it were required.

*wow*

I bow before this well written and extensive "review". This is an outstanding piece of reporting. Thank You.

Magnificent. Great writing style, important topic (to me), and I agree nearly 100% with all of it. GG coming your way!