Animals could be bred, and slaughtered
Agricola, the "new Caylus", made its US debut this week. I played a 3-player game at work with the drummer and the birdwatcher, and several games with algorithmancy and his ilk yesterday. It has nothing to do with coughdrops. It is a 17th-century farming sim, with a skeleton similar to that of Caylus, in that there is a set of actions players can perform, which grows as the game progresses, and only one player may use each action per round. Each player also has their own farm to develop independently a la Puerto Rico. You develop technology, raise livestock and crops, and kill them and eat them.
I don't want to start off with complaints, but they really could've provided better hardware. The scoring is intensive and there is no score track. There are scoring pads that seem like an afterthought. In the later games, algorithmancy decided go stones were a good substitute. The scoring is also structured so that various features can lose you points, so that basically a starting player has -18 points. I thought this was confusing and slightly demoralizing. And a minor complaint, the pawns for the animals are cubes. Is it really that much more expensive to make little cutouts shaped like sheep, pigs and cows? And the colors of some of the pawns, the worst being the light-brown clay and the medium-brown wood, are so similar as to be highly confusing.
The game has two play modes, basically simple and complex. It's a pretty imposing game, so as a learning tool the simple variant is important, but by itself it's only a mediocre game, and with five players it felt very crowded. The complex variant adds randomness by dealing a set of technological improvements to each player that only that player can develop. And there's hundreds of them to choose from. The customization and synergy this adds makes the game worthwhile. Fortunately algorithmancy and I had already played, and bakedweasels picks up on games really fast.
We found the promised play time of 30mins per player to be pretty accurate. So, if you're a fan of 2-hour eurogames, Agricola is worth a try, and be sure to try out the complex variant even if you're not impressed with the learning mode.
I don't want to start off with complaints, but they really could've provided better hardware. The scoring is intensive and there is no score track. There are scoring pads that seem like an afterthought. In the later games, algorithmancy decided go stones were a good substitute. The scoring is also structured so that various features can lose you points, so that basically a starting player has -18 points. I thought this was confusing and slightly demoralizing. And a minor complaint, the pawns for the animals are cubes. Is it really that much more expensive to make little cutouts shaped like sheep, pigs and cows? And the colors of some of the pawns, the worst being the light-brown clay and the medium-brown wood, are so similar as to be highly confusing.
The game has two play modes, basically simple and complex. It's a pretty imposing game, so as a learning tool the simple variant is important, but by itself it's only a mediocre game, and with five players it felt very crowded. The complex variant adds randomness by dealing a set of technological improvements to each player that only that player can develop. And there's hundreds of them to choose from. The customization and synergy this adds makes the game worthwhile. Fortunately algorithmancy and I had already played, and bakedweasels picks up on games really fast.
We found the promised play time of 30mins per player to be pretty accurate. So, if you're a fan of 2-hour eurogames, Agricola is worth a try, and be sure to try out the complex variant even if you're not impressed with the learning mode.