Agricola - The Game Everyone's Talking About Due In Soon
Agricola is the game everyone’s currently talking about and Game Stack is due to receive its first shipment soon.
Agricola is Latin for “farmer” and in this game you play the role of a 17th century farmer who starts the game with a wooden shack, a spouse and little else. If the theme doesn’t grab you, the gameplay will because this just might be the game of the year.
Each player is a farmer who is trying to keep their family fed while expanding their farm by ploughing fields, sowing crops, building fences to create pastures and breeding livestock. Players score victory points for the various aspects of the farm after a set number of rounds and the winner is the player with the most VPs.
Each round is both simple and complicated, in a similar way to a game like Caylus. Each player starts with two family members and players place one family member onto one of the available actions and immediately take that action. Play proceeds clockwise with each player in turn placing one family member until all of them have been placed. Each action can only be used once so if someone else takes the action you had your eye on you will need to have a back-up plan ready.
At the start of each round a new action card is revealed and becomes available for use by all players. Some actions require housekeeping as they accumulate resources or animals each round.
At the end of certain rounds there is a harvest phase where players harvest their planted crops, breed animals and feed their family. Each member of a player’s family requires two food tokens in order to be sufficiently well fed. Any shortfall mean a player has to take a begging card for each point of food not provided, and the begging cards are worth negative points at the end of the game.
After fourteen rounds there is one final harvest and then players score points for the various aspects of their farm such as rooms in their home, number of family members, grain, vegetables, animals, number of pastures, bonus points from certain cards played, etc. The winner is the player with the most points.
Like Cuba and Caylus, this is a game with countless strategies and players will need Plans B,C and D ready for when Plan A fails. Game components include 360 cards and more than 300 wooden pieces.
Watch this space for details of our first shipment of a game that has already taken the US by storm.
