Author Topic: Agricola  (Read 1061 times)

Dragon

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Agricola
« on: November 27, 2022, 18:15:55 »
Agricola is a challenging worker placement game where players have to build up their farm by adding to their house, plowing fields, growing crops, building pastures and getting animals. Players also have to manage their workers to bring enough food home for harvest time in order to feed their family, otherwise they will take Begging cards as penalties, which give negative points. The most well balanced farms are considered the best, so if you are lacking any of the main elements from your farm, or have unused spaces on your land at the end of the game, you'll take negative points for those also.

Isaac has mentioned that this is currently his favorite game, although we've only gotten it out once this year, but it was on his birthday.

Beth has been doing the best when playing Agricola in the past few years, winning the last 4 games that we've played. On Isaac's birthday it was no exception. I did terrible, picking up 2 Begging cards during the first harvest.  Final score: Beth: 38, Isaac: 29, Nathaniel: 23.

I do also want to note here that over the years that I've owned and played Agricola, I've thought for a long time that as long as you had a Fireplace or Cooking Hearth that you were able to use them to cook animals any time you wanted or needed to because the cards literally say "At any time, you may convert goods to Food as follows..." with the only specifications being the number of food tokens that you'd gain for each animal or vegetable. Even in the rulebook, the section about Harvest Phase 2: Feeding the family doesn't mention any limitation about cooking the animals during that time, although we do know that the pair of animals need to exist after the Feeding phase in order to give birth to the new animals. However, after playing Agricola on BoardGameArena and being blocked from cooking my extra animals during the Harvest phase, I submitted a Bug Report to the developers on that site. Eventually, although it was not a straight forward explanation (at one point I was bluntly told that it was in the rules without any specific example where even though I provided counter statements along with section titles and page numbers for reference), I came to understand that the exception about using the Fireplace and Cooking Hearths is in the section labeled "Harvest Phase 3: Breeding" which says "Baby animals and parent animals may not be converted into Food immediately after the birth (for example, if you only have room for two animals of that type); they simply run away if they cannot be accommodated." So that's new to me.
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