Killer Dice is a semi-regular column about board games, card games and pen and paper RPGs.

Agricola is a game about farming.  When I was first told about the game, that fact caused be to roll my eyes and groan in a cynical-before-my-time fashion because whenever I hear a game is about farming, my first response is for my brain to conjure up the image of FarmVille or Harvest Moon or some other farming-based video game that I personally find more tedious than watching vegetables grow.

Playing Agricola was therefore an exercise in humility when it revealed itself to be a spectacularly well designed, well balanced and more than anything enjoyable game to play.

Farming sim video games generally have their approach to farming all wrong by often paining a rosy image of the process.  Farming is not, and never has been, a quaint and idyllic lifestyle.  Farming is back breaking work, stressful and fraught with difficulties even in modern agriculture and has always required an immense amount of forward planning.

Agricola perfectly encapsulates this knife-edge between success and failure in a way that is not immediately obvious.

Each turn you send out members of your family to perform certain actions in the building and management of your farm, such as collecting resources or animals, building fences or adding rooms to your house, or ploughing fields and sowing grain.  On a particularly lonely evening, I tried playing the game with its solo rules and couldn’t see where the fun was hiding as it was just plodding along and doing whatever you wanted to do in order to build a farm.

When I tried Agricola with opponents however, the elements that contribute to the strategy leapt out at me.  The single most effective mechanic is that only one family member can be on any one action at any one time.  If you want to take “plough a field” action, and one of your opponents is sat on the “plough a field” action, then you can’t do it.  This can result in some very distressing moments when you realise that your whole carefully planned out farm-management-strategy was hinging on being able to sow your grain in time for the harvest which you can no longer do because your often-oblivious opponent had exactly the same plan and got there first.

The requirement to plan and strategise doesn’t have to arise out having aggressive or antagonistic opponents, you just need to plan for the fact that your opponents will be in all innocence trying to do the exact same things as you.  That’s not to say that you can’t start meddling with other people’s plans, and with the right group of people that is undoubtedly a fun way to play, but even if you have everyone keeping to themselves, you can’t avoid the inadvertent interaction and spoiling of plans.

The main balancing act comes from the dual goals of the game.  First there’s the overall goal of building the best farm to score the most points.  This is based on how big your farm is, how much you have grown or how many animals you have and how big your family is.  At the same time there is the more short term ongoing goal to feed said family.

Feeding the family is not quite as simple as it sounds.  Periodically, the game dictates that you enter a harvest phase and must give food to your family.  Food is a separate resource that does not count towards your score and must be acquired from actions or through converting your produce which means that if you panic, you’ll end up with too much worthless food and not enough time to build a winning farm by the time the game ends, but if you don’t prepare enough food, your family will be forced to go begging which drastically damages your final score.  Agricola is the first game I’ve played that has been able to simulate a genuine regret for having children.  It seemed like such a good idea at the time, right up to the point that they got hungry.

Just like farming in real life, you often don’t see the consequences of your actions until much further down the line.  Savvy crop planting early on will only reap the benefits many turns later and investing in improvements to your farm to help convert produce to food might immediately seem to set you back but can bail you out of some awkward situations when it comes to a future harvest.

The only thing I could possibly criticise Agricola for, other than a slightly tedious solitaire rule set (and really, expecting an exhilarating single player board game experience is highly unreasonable), is that it is a little on the fiddly side and might be initially overwhelming to a new player.  The box is packed with tokens and counters and far more cards than you strictly need to play with, but as far as criticism goes this is near idiotic.  The excess of cards means that very few games will be exactly the same and there are going to be outlying elements on the periphery of the mechanics that will be different every time.  As well as this, the numerous resource counters are mostly part nicely coloured pieces of wood that have a beautiful feel to them in contrast to the prevalence of plastic in most board games.

After first playing Agricola, I wasn’t too impressed and didn’t really see why it was often mentioned in the same breath as board gaming stalwarts Catan and Carcassonne, but a few days after playing I realised that I was still mulling it over in my head and was starting to better understand the greater strategic and tactical aspects.  You might not instantly see where the game is in Agricola, but it will eventually find you if you give it a chance.

Killer Dice Summary:  Simple and easy to understand mechanics, strategic and tactical without forcing aggressive play and a beautifully polished product.  This is a game that can easily become a regular for your gaming group and wouldn’t be a bad introduction for non-board gamers.

Agricola by Uwe Rosenberg is a board game for 1-5 players available from all good board game shops and costs around £50.