[This review originally appeared on my blog at http://gaming.powerblogs.com/posts/1208227086.shtml]

I like Agricola. It’s fun. After playing, I don’t regret pre-ordering, I’ll play more when my copy arrives, and I may even try to upgrade my set ala David Fair (and others). I’d play it at the next game session (if I had a copy).

But I do not think it is a great game.

Agricola joins a long list of games that I enjoy despite obvious flaws. I’m thinking of Age of Renaissance, 7 Ages (although my mood on that swings around), and the like. Still, I’d play those instead of great designs I don’t enjoy (Diplomacy, abstracts, etc).

I’m not going to describe mechanisms or details. Dale Yu has written more than enough to enlighten. Just to make things worse, I’m assuming you know the basics. To recap – I like Agricola. I’d play it again at the next game session (if I could). It will likely hit the table another 5-10 times at a minimum. Having gotten that out of the way, I’m going to focus on the negatives.

I’ve played several times now. How many? Well, that depends on how you count. I’ve played four games by any definition. Another four ‘to my satisfaction’, but I suspect most readers will only count one or two of those. “To my satisfaction” means (in this case) that everyone agreed on who would win if the game was played out. Most of these were quickly adjudicated between the first and second harvest.

One was called after the opening deal.

There is a whole class of games where the opening setup determines the likely winner. Card games. They have a few other characteristics (at least for good ones): 1) they are short, 2) you play many hands to reduce the luck (or determine the better player). Good players will win more than their ‘fair’ share of games, but won’t win every hand.

Agricola is a single deal card game that takes 90+ minutes to resolve.

I’ve seen arguments that the cards are individually balanced, and I generally agree (with at least one glaring exception). Some are better, but the range isn’t bad. But cards aren’t just assessed individually. Take Bridge. The Space Ace is worth one trick. The King values usually takes a trick. With the ace, a full trick (assuming no trump). Without it, it depends on where the ace was dealt, how many suited cards each hand has, etc. The deuce of clubs may be a full trick in some hands … if they have enough clubs, but usually it’s not that important.

Each of Agricola’s 350-ish cards adds a new twist on a rule. That makes 60,000 two card combinations that are much more complicated than the relationship between the King of Spades and deuce of Clubs. When you confine things to the E deck, I suspect most two card combinations have been seen. Are there three card combinations? Undoubtedly. Assuming 100 cards (for E decks only) there are 160,000 3-card combinations. You start with seven cards and seven occupations. Five hundred (or a thousand) games is enough to smooth all single cards, but doesn’t begin to assess the combinations … (and how many of those games involved new players)?

I could argue which cards I think are problematic (and I will, but not now). A fair response is that I (or others) missed a counter to that card. I may well have. But we’re still playing a card game. Now, the question is – how many routine hands do we have? For now, call a routine hand one that “Given reasonable and competent players, the ‘better’ hand will win barring mistakes.” You can have routine good hands and routine bad hands, it may be exciting to take 13 tricks with thirteen of one suit, and it’s rare, but it doesn’t require skill. Likewise, it takes little skill to lose all 13 tricks with a flat yarborough.

Apart from routine hands you can have routine games. In card games like bridge, one side has a bad hand the other one often has a good one. These routine hands lead to routine deals. Games where you deal a subset of the cards may see multiple players have very good (or bad) hands.

Race for the Galaxy, which I love, has routine games. I estimate roughly 3%. If you picked a number from 1-10%, I’d be fine with that. I’d argue if you went much higher (or lower). From my (admittedly small) sample of Agricola, I’d put its “routine game” percentage at 50-75%. My estimate may be high since every game I’ve played had new players. I think everyone will agree that this number exists above 10%, and that’s problematic for a game thats 4-8 times as long as Race. (Even if you discount routine ‘good’ hands, you’ll occasionally see a routine ‘bad’ hand, such as one that has no useful early minor improvements, which makes several of the actions much worse).

Only once have I been unsure of the winner after the second harvest, and it that game I had picked two people (out of five), who came in 1st and 2nd. I publicly predicted the winner of my second game (which we finished) during turn 3. He botched the endgame (never building a single fence, so earning -1 for enclosures and something like -5 for unused spaces) and won handily.

[Tangentially, this is why I stopped playing Cosmic Encounter for years … everyone wanted to play with 2+ power combinations. I now prefer playing with single powers, they are reasonably well balanced].

I hope scores will tighten as players get better, but the cards have a huge impact.

Agricola has other issues, as well. These aren’t nearly as important, but exist.

1. The ‘family increase’ mechanic (which moves you from two actions to three) is very important, and provides a positive feedback mechanism. Feeding does produce a negative feedback as well, but not nearly at the same effect. Assuming no occupations (and no player manages to get a 4th action before anyone gets a 3rd) then the last player to grow his family will miss out on 4 actions (in a five player game). That’s effectively giving the first person an extra full turn. This effect is so important that ignoring everything to focus on family growth seems to be a dominant strategy. Worse yet, growing your family is a strong source of victory points. If growing your family cost you resources, and earned actions but no victory points, it would be a more interesting tradeoff.

2. [1a, really] – The extra action from family growth is so powerful that the ‘family game’ (without cards) is simply an exercise in getting your home ready for your first child. With two players, even one extra turn seems dominant. [The family game is still a card game, but now the deal is the ordering of the rounds.]

3. Because of the card interaction and family growth issue, I suspect every 4+ player game will have at least one player ‘eliminated’ early on, with a score of roughly half (or less) of the winning score..

4. Livestock seem a much superior form of food & victory points than farming. Like family growth, this makes the best “resource” path also the best “victory points” path (since there are four categories for livestock, vs three for agriculture … and stables makes a fifth, arguably). You can delay your plowing until the very late game and still get good agricultural points, but you can’t put off breeding.

5. Turn order effects. When the start player is passing back and forth between you and another player, it really matters if you are sitting besides each other. Also, some cards improve certain spaces, and again order matters. Caylus’ “Inn” mechanism works much better than Agricola’s blunt “Start Player.”

With all that, I think Agricola is worth trying and playing multiple times. And I enjoy it. But, from a critical standpoint (meaning “looking strictly at the design”), it’s not good. A good game should take as long as required to determine the winner, and no longer. Bridge (a great game) would be farcical if you spent 30 minutes playing a hand. Agricola is chess between even players where you may be randomly up a knight or down a queen, but don’t know until halfway through the game.

The good news? Often the game conceals this from you. Most hands have something, and monstrously good hands may be hidden (until the end). There’s enough going on that even a good hand can be misplayed.

Agricola took several great ideas (a Caylus-like placement system, a Cosmic-like special power system, a complex resource management system) and then shoved them together. It’s enjoyable but, like most cross-breeds, an odd beast. I suspect that, like Age of Renaissance in particular, I'll eventually get annoyed playing around with all those fiddly pieces to decide a card game. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though.

You're a brave man.

And one I agree with on all counts, including that Agricola is fun to play and I will buy it when Z-man's version comes out. But it is deeply flawed and that does hurt the experience and not just a little bit.

The other problem that I have with it that is not mentioned here is more or less the same problem I have with Race for the Galaxy. In order to play effectively, I must track not just all the cards I have played to my tableau but those that all others have played. Not even taking into account trying to deduce from this what cards they might have hidden in their hands. That is a lot to track for me, and perhaps it is more a weakness in me than in the game, but it really is not my preference to have to consider all of that information when trying to decide on an action. Maybe more experience and more knowledge of the cards and card combinations will mitigate this, but there sure are a lot of cards to learn.

Ok, I'll bite.

Is Agricola's worker placement that different than Puerto Rico's Role Picking? If the former can be solely decided based on "cards dealt", then the latter can surely be decided solely on "plantations dealt".

If a occupation/improvement gives a player an edge on an action, is it worth getting in there first? This can be weighed differently in 2-player vs. 3+ player games. And like any Role Picking/Worker Placement game depends on who's at the table. I'd hardly call any game I've played 'decided by turn 3'. Sure, I would place bets on the best 'player', not on the cards shown.

Animals better than Plants? Does everyone in Puerto Rico ship Corn?

Consequently I find your whole review, if not in jest, seriously flawed.

PS - In a 5-player game there are 2 Family growth squares. Also, in our last 4-player game, the first player to get that 3rd member actually came dead last.

I don't care if you don't like Agricola (FWIW, I give it an 8/10, so I'm not a 10/10 fanboy either). But I do find your comments to contain misconceptions/misleadings that are clearly unjust/untrue.

What's up, I thought all reviews of Agricola, good or bad, came with 37 thumbs out of the gate?

I'd give your review a thumb, but I don't think you took into account the opportunites the OTHER players have to ruin a superior hand of cards. It is NOT multiplayer solitaire. Just because you got a great set of cards, does not mean that you will 1) be able to get them to the table effeiciently, nor 2) the other players aren't going to take actions that might give you big bonuses (e.g., last game a player played a card that gave her +1 cattle when she took cattle - our first actions were to always take cattle; she only managed to get ONE extra cattle, which effectively made her waste the action she used to play the card.)

Nice review.

Yeah. It's a card game.

If we take serious issue with "routine hands" and luck in card games, we're better off looking elsewhere for enjoyment. It seems to me that plenty of other card games share these same "flaws" with Agricola's cardplay. Comes with the territory, IMO. I would assume that part of the point of the sheer number of cards in the game was to assuage some of the perceived problems, but... it's still inescapably a card game.

I really liked the observations about family growth. That is a significant concern to me, but I suppose it's going to be an area where players will have to compete aggressively so as to avoid being left behind.

Thumbed!

I like your review, as it points to an aspect of the game that definitely exists and that some will consider a flaw. I would consider it a flaw if I thought that it was as influential as you say, but after about a dozen plays I'm still unconvinced that the winner is decided by the cards as often as you suggest. I've seen a game where one player had a killer combination that blew everyone out of the water (1 game out of ~12); I've also seen killer combinations lose, and twice I've seen a player win without using any cards.

At the end of the day, I've simply seen the better players do better most of the time (much more than 25-50% of the time, as you implicitly suggest). Not to toot my own horn, but just as an example: I have either won or lost by 1 point all of the games I've played, with the exception of one game where I lost by 2 points (and Agricola is not a game of necessarily close scores). Note: I don't attribute this to some superior intelligence, but rather simply that I have lots of experience with this type of game- even a monkey will eventually learn to play Mozart.

So although your arguments on the surface seem convincing (clearly there will often be a large discrepancy between the quality of players' starting hands), my personal experience suggests to me that there is at least to an extent a built-in opportunity cost to bringing occupations into play (minor improvements are generally not as influential). Is it enough to make the game as balanced as games like Puerto Rico or Caylus? Of course not. And this is why I praise your article, because it brings this issue up so that people don't build up false expectations. But I don't think this is a game that is preemptively decided by the cards- to call a game after the deal without even starting to play seems like a rush to judgment and on the whole a little pretentious after just a couple plays. But hey, you are a great reviewer- maybe you see these things early on and I'll be agreeing with you after I play another 20 times.

Actually, I'm not convinced of the importance of family growth. The last game that I played was a 4-player family game. I had played about 10 times before, two others one or two times, and there was one beginner. The first-time player collected enough wood and reed to build two rooms at the same time, and had her second child on the 6th turn. On the other hand, I didn't build any rooms during the game, and only used family growth in the last turn, so I didn't have any extra actions at all. That means that she had at least 17 extra actions compared to me. She won in the end, but I was second -- with a difference of just 1 point!

Of course, part of the reason was that this was her first game. Against more experience players, I don't think I could have done that well with two actions per turn less... But this game makes me think that the benefits of a child are much less than you would think. Note that there is more than one kind of negative feedback here: you mention the food, but there is also the cost of building the rooms; also, when it's your turn to play your third action, the best actions are already gone. Even when I'm last in the playing order, I sometimes cannot find a useful action to take with my second family member, so a third action has less effect than you think.

Against experienced opponents, it should cost you 3 or 4 actions to collect the necessary resources for 1 room, and 1 action to build it. That's half of your actions in the first phase, for a benefit of 7 to 9 actions later in the game; a net profit of around 4 actions. But you have to feed the child 5 times, 10 food; I would count that as 2 or 3 actions at least (probably more, since the third action will seldom give you more than 2 food). If everyone in your group competes for early family growth, costs will go up, and it may well be profitable to ignore family growth entirely.

I agree about the unfairness of the seating order, but I don't feel that that is getting in the way of my enjoyment; it's just one more factor to take into account. I haven't played enough with cards against experienced players to say anything useful about them.

The importance of cards and card combos will become the classical complaint against this game. I have played four games of Agricola during the last three weeks. Three of them were played against beginners and the last one against average players. Of the eleven persons involved in all these game three of them thought that the the cards in the game are not only important for the way the players should develope and improve their farms but also that are (more or less) the key of the final result. So we could say that, in their first game, these three friends completly agreed with the reviewer.

Of course, the cards are important. Combos exist and some of the cards are very dangerous in the hand of an experienced player (wooden oven and bakers oven for example). But in my own opinion, based in my experience with this board game (about 10 seroius games and 5 solitaries) there are almost no unstopabble hands. I have said almost, so there are some, but you can also have a combined 37 points hand playing bridge and go for the Grand Slam withou oposition.

We always deal the normal hand of 7/7 cards for each player, but we use the rule (included at the end of the game annex) in which every player is allowed to discard up to three cards of his/her hand, and receive the same ammount of new cards in the discarded class. This reduces the chances of having players with extremelly poor hands (but I admit that can also produce even stronger combos for the ones that already had good cards in their hands).

Anyway, the key for me, as other fellow boardgamer said, is that there are luck involved in every card game and that this is something you have to admit and accept in order to enjoy these kind of games. I get the point that luck is less important when the game is short, and that in longer games luck could be, and usually is, a devastating element, a game killer. But in my own opinion luck and powerful hands are not that important here. I think that the killer hands are present in -10% of the games. But I also admit that you are not isolated in your opinion and that, may be, even mine will change with more and more plays.

By now I love this game, I accept the amount of luck that are involved with the card dealing, and I think that almost any hand (not all, but the majority) could be fight by the other fellow players with care, attention and their own hands.

Disclaimer: I have not played Agricola, but it is on my wishlist. My comments here are solely to get more information about the game, not to be argumentative.



It would seem to me that the biggest difference is that in Puerto Rico you aren't stuck with just your opening plantation. You get to add plantations of your choice (within the limit of what's available, which affects all players). Plus, the plantations you get at the outset are based on your position in the turn order as a means of compensation for those later in the order.

In Agricola, from what I understand the only random factor is your hand of cards at the start of the game, which is hidden from other players. This seems to imply two things:

1) If some hands are better than others, some players will have a concrete advantage before the first move of the game.
2) Since hands are secret, players will not know who has the advantage and thus will not be able to determine whom to block until the game has progressed a fair amount.

I can't comment on the OP's other criticisms, but this one appears valid to me. I'm certainly happy to hear opposing views since I'm still strongly considering this game.