And my pet will be … a cow – a review of the board game “Family Agricola

Build and manage your own farm, and your inhabitants and livestock will surely be happy and bring you victory.

I came across Agricola for the first time over 10 years ago. I don’t like ugly games, and Klemens Franz’s graphics don’t appeal to me at all, but ultimately mechanics are more important to me in board games, so I let myself be persuaded to play the game. It turned out to be quite decent, although completely devoid of the euro vibe, which is standard when the designer is Uwe Rosenberg.

Currently, the Rebel publishing house is responsible for the series of agricultural titles. So far, no specific release date has been given for the gamer version, but the family edition has already had its premiere. Even though I don’t remember exactly all the rules of the old Agricola , you can clearly see that the reviewed version is simpler and the changed graphics are nicer to look at.

The beginnings of the farm

Place the board in the center of the table with the appropriate side facing up. Place the building tiles and the round counting pawn on the indicated fields, and the gathering, multiple, room, field, pasture and food tokens, as well as animal figurines, building materials, grain and barns next to it.

Each player receives a hut and two farmers to live in it, and food. This is a starting farm, and our task is to expand it.

At the beginning of the round, add markers and tokens to the spaces with an arrow on the board. Then we’ll be able to take them if we send an employee to pick them up. Then, one by one, each player places one of his farmers on an unoccupied action space and performs the indicated action. Once the players have sent all their figures onto the board, the homecoming phase begins and preparation for the next round begins. We move the pawn counting the rounds forward, which will unlock them by passing the next action fields.

If we come across a harvest symbol, we must collect one grain marker from our fields, feed each of our men with two food tokens, and breed animals by adding one figurine of a given species if we have at least two in our farm. Of course, we must have space for them, because corrals have limited capacity.

After fourteen rounds, we carry out the final harvest and score points for family members, tokens in our farm (excluding wooden huts), grain in fields, animals in pens and barns in pastures. Some building tiles also give us extra points at the end of the game. The person with the highest score becomes the best farmer.

Hard work pays off

Family Agricola , unlike the original, has a chance to catch the eye of customers on the shelf in the store. The title suggests an accessible board game for parents with children, and indeed it is. The rules are simple and our moves are to send workers to the board to do something for us. This is a typical worker placement, thanks to which younger players will be able to practice this popular and often used mechanics in more difficult board games.

Despite its simplicity, the game gives you the opportunity to mix things up. It all depends on the action fields that we can get to. We can get resources from them, expand or rebuild a hut, enlarge a family, choose a field and sow it with grain, build a farm or build one of the available buildings. The latter gives us new possibilities, e.g. in turning our livestock into food when it’s harvest time and we don’t have enough chips to feed our family.

Although family Agricola is unlikely to find fans among advanced players, who will certainly choose a more difficult version, less experienced people and families with children will be more likely to reach for the simpler one. It can also work well as learning the mechanics of worker placement, because it easily shows how important the sequence of our actions, planning and management is. Points can be earned from a wide variety of tiles, markers, and tiles, but to win, you need to be better than everyone else at using your farm’s resources.