Finca

I swear, it seems each year we see Eurogames with odder and less cohesive themes, while the gameplay just gets stronger. Finca is a case in point.

The premise, if you can call it that, is that the players are farmers living on the turning blades of a giant windmill, where they harvest fruit. They then get on their donkeys and sell their fruit to the neighboring towns. When a town runs out of demand for fruit, a "finca" (some kind of monument) is erected there, because... I don't know, they're holding a festival for the god of fruit or something. But none of this has the slightest thing to do with the gameplay.

The gameplay is refreshingly simple. On your turn you can either collect fruit, or deliver it. Delivering fruit scores you victory points. You collect fruit by moving around a circular track (this is where the windmill blades come in -- you're moving from blade to blade, a feeble narrative excuse for having twelve detachable board pieces so that you can have a different board configuration each game). You have several people in various spots on the windmill. A person moves a number of spaces (clockwise) equal to the total number of people starting on the same space, including itself, so a single person can move one space and a person in a crowd can easily jump halfway across the board. You then collect fruit equal to the number of people on the square you end on. This leads to an ebb-and-flow dynamic as players first tend to clump on a few spaces in order to collect large amounts of fruit, and then they start leaping off to fling themselves around the board. You need to move around, you see, because every half-lap you make around the board earns you a donkey token, and you must spend a token to deliver any fruit at all.

From this, you might think that the best strategy would be to just sit back and stockpile tons of fruit, then make a few massive deliveries at choice times. Two things prevent this. First, you can only deliver so many fruit on a single turn, so you can't just dump your entire stores at once. Second, if the game ever runs out of any type of fruit (or donkey tokens) and someone must collect them on their turn, everyone has to throw all of their stores of that type back to the center pool, so if everyone stockpiles then everyone is going to get burned by it.

Because of this, the game has a definite rhythm to it, almost in the musical sense. You're collecting fruit, then delivering. There's a tension between collecting lots of fruit (but not necessarily moving around a lot), and moving your people enough to collect sufficient donkeys for delivery. Meanwhile, you're all competing to fill the same fruit orders, first come first served, so you may start going after one set of fruits only to change to another set when someone else gets there first. And each turn is so simple -- collect and deliver are your only options -- so the game flows quickly while still giving players a meaningful choice each turn. Or more precisely, multiple meaningful choices, as you must first choose collect or deliver, then where to collect from or deliver to. And each of those has several factors involved in decision making, due to the scoring system that I'm not going to go into.

Ultimately, this is a game that can be taught in a few minutes, played in about 45 minutes, and has a theme that is at least family-friendly (if you can look past the rest of it).