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.