Agricola is a bit of a departure for Uwe Rosenberg, previously best known for his tight, engaging cardgame, Bohnanza. Agricola is instead a big, sprawling game, quite complicated by the standards of the Eurostyle, and "tight" is not quite the word.
The US edition retails for $70, and the box contains enough wood to build a substantial house -- well, a substantial dollhouse, in any event. You play a family of farmers, seeking to plow and harvest fields; fence in pasturage and raise sheep, boar, and cattle; and build a larger house for your family, while upgrading it from wood to clay to stone.
It's an "action selection" game, but unlike Puerto Rico, when you choose an action you exclude others from choosing the same action on the same turn. At game start, only a limited number of actions are available, but a new action becomes available each turn. Each person in your family can perform one action, and you place the marker representing a person atop one of the actions when you select it.
Basic resources are wood, clay, reeds, and stone; stone does not become available until midgame. Collecting a resource is an action; resources accumulate on the action cards if no one grabs that resource in a turn. In addition to building houses and fences, you can also build "minor" and "major" constructions, some of which earn victory points and almost all have some use (e.g., ovens to increase the rate at which grain and animals can be converted to food).
Every few turns, you must feed your family; grain and vegetables from field, as well as domesticated animals, can be converted to food.
Because almost everything can generate victory points, there are several potential paths to victory -- concentrating on animals or farming, or on house construction, going for the largest family, or trying a balanced approach. In addition, the action limitations are a key source of strategy -- as much in terms of selecting an action another player needs to screw him up as in terms of careful selection of your own actions.
I've thoroughly enjoyed Agricola each time I've played it, it's highly rated on Boardgamegeek, and it won the a 2008 Spiel des Jahres award for best complex game -- and yet in some ways, I find the fiddliness of the game awkward. As an example, many of the actions actually allow multiple actions -- e.g., improving your house and building a minor improvement. Presumably this is for purposes of "balance," encouraging players to use actions that are otherwise less powerful than others, but it's an inelegant complexity. Similarly, the rules for when and how you can sow, plow, and bake bread feel a little awkward.
At the beginning of the game, each player receive 8 "minor improvement" and 8 "occupation" cards; each of these offers some special ability (e.g., gain food when you gather reeds, gain a stone before it normally becomes available). These are, in fact, quite necessary to break the symmetry of the game, and intelligent players will build their strategy around them; but this system is awkward in two ways. First, some card combinations can be quite unbalancing, and second, this means that new players, in particular, have a lot to try to absorb and interpret at game start. (There is a "family game" version which eliminates the cards, but it is a far less interesting game without them.) It would be more elegant and smoother, I think, if players accumulated these cards over time, instead -- but that would also create a feeling that the game is more luck-driven, with a lucky draw toward the end-game possibly determining its outcome.
It's clear that Agricola has been very extensively tested and refined -- indeed, the fiddliness to which I object is a reflection of this, minor additions and changes by the designer over iterative play. But one of the aspects of the Eurogame aesthetic I find most appealing is the stark elegance you see in games like Medici or Rosenberg's own Bohnanza -- an aspect that feels missing from Agricola. Consequently, while I admire the game and think there's much to be learned from it, it leaves me short of unabashed enthusiasm.
Spiel des Jahres
Just a quick correction - Agricola didn't win THE Spiel des Jahres, but was awarded a 'special' prize for best complex game.
It's no. 1 (so why try harder?)
Actually it's the top-rated game on Boardgamegeek.com among tens of thousands of games. Quite a darling :-)
I'd say it's a must play for anyone who's interested in euro-type board games.
Not my personal favorite, since gameplay makes me feel a bit "limited" in my choices, when I play. This gets a bit better as you play it more, and learn how to maximise your play and get better food producion etc. (you DON'T want to starve in this game!), but I still feel it's a game where you choose between a narrow selection of choices, and often many of them will be bad for you. It makes me feel constricted as opposed to other games where you have a broader choice, and can afford a few slip-ups without getting hopelessly behind. All a matter of taste, though, and I guess the majority has spoken on this one ;-)
Hate this Game
I despise this game. The thing that bothers you about the cards, Greg? That thing makes me loathe it. There are far too many cards, and they deliberately screw with the game in a variety of unpredictable ways. It makes actual strategy of Puerto Rico style impossible. If I want random chaos masquerade as complexity, I would rather just play Talisman or Flux.
Fixing the cards
The issue of unbalanced hands in Agricola is significant, but it's also pretty easily fixed with a simple draft: each player take his hand of 8 occupations, chooses one, and passes the remaining 7 to the player to his left. Then each player chooses one of the 7, passes again, and so on, until everyone has drafted a full hand of 8. Once we started doing this, the complaint about play-balance went away.
The feeling that gameplay is canalized went away after repeated plays, too. Once you get better at managing your actions, and learn how to better time various things in the game, you stop thinking "what do I have to do to keep my family from starving next harvest," and start thinking "can I build a five-room stone house?"
I can see that a draft would
I can see that a draft would definitely help, but all players would need a good knowledge of the cards in the first place and how they interact with the board actions and one another or risk getting properly screwed early on. I think one of the problems is that you need to have a pretty good knowledge of all the improvement/ occupation cards as well as the action cards before you can even start thinking about a strategy.
I've found the fact that there's so much information of varying sorts in the game can be quite overwhelming and lead to long rounds where players review their hand, read up on the remaining major improvements and check all the board actions before deciding on their action. Add this to all the inter round busy work of replenishing stocks etc. the game can flow very poorly; the play time in the rules suggests 30mins per player, my experience is closer to 60mins (or more) per player.
That said I think Greg's review is pretty much spot on, the balance and polish is evident even if you can't grasp the whole game. I'm a big eurogame fan and find the atypical level of complexity here a turn off. It would be interesting to see a digital translation of this game, I think it could mitigate many of my issues with it.