Review: Agricola

Agricola is a 1-5 player resource management game about farming.  It's quite possibly the most complicated resource management game I've played, but it's definitely a well designed game.  Just don't play without a lot of time set aside and players who are focused on the game.  But for the players truly interested in a deep game that requires a lot of planning and out playing each other.

The game board(s) are covered in the various actions a player can take.  Some actions gather accumulated resources, some build things, some give you new occupations, taking over starting player position, etc.  Just like Puerto Rico's roles, only one player can take each action, so it becomes not only a game about maximizing your turns, but out-thinking your opponents.  You have to not only have multiple strategies planned out, but they all have to be very flexible plans in case someone takes the action you were relying on, especially if you are playing a 5 player game.

Each round unlocks one new action that players can take and after set rounds, players must feed their families or become beggars.  As the game goes on, this harvest time comes sooner and sooner, making players have to alternate between making their farm grow and getting food out of their farm.  At the end of all the rounds, players score their farms (any missing animals, vegetables, or grains or unused fields subtract points, surpluses, upgraded houses, and a large family score a lot of points), and the highest score wins.  There's no way you're going to be able to have everything on your farm, so you generally have to try to be diverse and pick one or two places to have a surplus and hope no one else picked the same.  The only real downside I have with the game is that it takes so long that even though I want to play again to try other strategies, I just don't have enough time.  Fortunately, that's a smaller and slightly faster version for two players called Agricola: All Creatures Big And Small.