It’s hard to imagine that Agricola has existed since I was in high school. The things I would have done to have known about Agricola’s existence during the years when I was living with my primary gaming buddy. I can guarantee you, we would have been playing Agricola over and over again, as it feels like the kind of game that you can replay endlessly and just get better and better at.
Agricola (or Misery Farm as many have dubbed it) is a worker placement game about building up your farm and family. You can build fences and stables, expand your home, have kids (cough cheap labour cough), collect wood, stone, reed, and raise sheep, boar, and cows. Just in case you were worried there wasn’t enough to do, you can also work the land and grow grain and vegetables as well.
The end game scoring in Agricola awards you points for how much of each object you’ve acquired over the course of the game, and punishes you with negative points if you ignore them. Being a jack of all trades is key on a farm.
Agricola begins with a small selection of key action spaces, with a new action space getting revealed every round. Each player has 2 workers in their farm. From the start, you are tasked with generating enough food to feed your family at the end of every harvest. The first harvest is 5 turns away from the start, giving you a bit of runway. The subsequent harvests come progressively quicker. By the time you get past the halfway point of the game and the harvest start happening every other turn, you better have some kind of food generating engine rolling, and/or be producing a surplus of food. If you can’t feed your people during a harvest round, you need to beg, which is more negative points. Keep in mind an average score in Agricola is around the mid to low thirties, negative 3 points could represent 10% of your total score, all for failing to generate enough food during a harvest.
Almost half of the worker placement action spots in Agricola generate some kind of resource: wood, clay, stone, reed, grain, vegetable, sheep, boar, or cow. A major component to Agricola is that every round, each of those spaces generate and stockpile their resource. If those resources don’t get picked up by someone, they continue to generate goods, making those spots even more attractive in the next round. It can be agonizing trying to decide if you want to take the juicy 9 wood that have built up over 3 rounds, or if you really need to play a new occupation card before someone locks that spot down. Can you do both? Will someone steal all that wood out from under you?
Another component to this game that makes it amazing replayable are the two types of cards that are either dealt out or drafted at the start of each game. There are more than 100 of each of the minor improvement cards and occupation cards, and both give your family special bonuses and powers once they’ve been built or claim. The minor improvements are tools that players are using to gain extra resources or to break the rules of the game. The occupation cards generally cost food to play (except the first one’s free), but these give you persistent powers, with things like “Every time you go fishing, get an extra food” or “any time you take wood from an action space, you may leave one wood behind and take two food instead” or “Your people can eat rocks.”
I understand the theme here is that you’re trading your rock sculptures for food, but I choose to believe that I’m feeding my family a plate full of rocks.
Each player receives 7 of each type of card at the beginning of the game, and it’s up to them to separate the wheat from the chaff. Each player needs to figure out their own synergies and make the occupations and improvements they were dealt work for them, as there’s absolutely no way that any player can play all their cards. When just dealing out 7 of each type of card to each player, there is the chance that someone will be dealt some amazing combo that allows them to become the king of the swamp. I find that the draft variant is more satisfying, in that all players get to see more cards, and have more opportunity to build towards something, rather than trying to make sense of the lot they were dealt.
Now, Agricola is called misery farm for a reason, and the first half of the game is tense as you’re trying to get your farm up and running from scratch. Gain and Vegetables grow every harvest, and having more than one animal after feeding your family will result in getting more animals, so it’s in your best interest to invest in these industries early to reap the rewards over several harvests.
The challenge is that everyone is trying to get their farms running in the same way. And you’ll be damned if your neighbour gets those 3 sheep one turn before the harvest. Likewise, everyone is contesting for the limited number of resources that are being generated each round. Sure, you got the sheep, but did you get the wood you needed to build a fence to keep them?
Agricola does still make me bury my head in my hands as I try to map out how to get an engine started from nothing. Trying to optimize and maximize my few turns in the early game to set myself up for success in the late game is crucial and difficult but satisfying. It’s a tense game, with the penalty for playing poorly utterly punishing. With all this tension and misery, when you manage to come out the other side victorious, it’s blissful. You feel like you’ve overcome a significant challenge, you earned a victory, not stumbled into one.
I could ramble on and on about how much I adore Agricola. It sits as #8 on my favourite games of all time list for a reason. It’s utterly satisfying to play, it’s engaging, and exciting, even 17 years after its original release. I highly recommend Agricola, for multiple plays. Uwe Rosenberg crafted a brilliant modern classic board game that stands the test of time. There is always room on my table for another game of Agricola.
That Time You Killed Me is an abstract strategy game for 2 players, designed by Peter C. Hayward and released in 2021. It’s kind of like chess, but with more murder. Murder by squishing. Squishy murder.
As the story goes, you’ve invented time travel! Yay! Except someone else is claiming that they also invented time travel. And they’re going to kill you to keep you silent. Unless you kill them first to silence their claims. Unfortunately, because time is all wibbly wobbly, there are several copies spread out amongst the timelines, so you’re gonna have to do a lot of murdering before the job is truly complete.
There are 3 zones of play, the past, the present, and the future. Each player starts with one pawn in each zone. The goal is to manoeuvre your pawns and push your opponent into the wall until you’re the last pawn standing on two of the three zones of time. Players can only focus on one zone at a time, and only one pawn be active during a turn. Each turn, a single active pawn can take two actions. Those actions include moving orthogonally in their current zone, or jumping forward and backward through time, popping up on other zones and creating copies of themselves.
That Time You Killed Me has 4 chapters in the box, and we have so far only played with a single chapter. The first box introduces seeds which can planted for an action. When a seed is planted, it grows over time. From a seed grows a pointy murder bush that is immovable and kills all who are pressed against it. Moving forward in time it blossoms into a mighty tree that is felled with the slightest touch and crushes anyone on the other side.
The other side of the creation coin, is un-creation. For an action, you can unplant a seed and remove the bush and tree from the next two timelines. With a limited number of seeds in the game, you may find yourself hording seeds on your side of the board to prevent your opponent from erecting a murder bush right in the path of future you. Time is fickle like that.
That Time You Killed Me has all the things that make an abstract strategy game great. The feeling of being smart when you lay a trap and lure an opponent in, the mental stress as you puzzle out several permutations before deciding on which one would be best to progress. But the game also greatly benefits from the fact that designer Peter C. Hayward is an actual author, and he flexes his narrative muscle to great effect here. That Time You Killed Me is a delight to behold, from the story and context given in the rule book, to just how the game has this emergent narrative as your clones fall backwards in time to suddenly squash an unsuspecting pawn.
Seriously, the narrative element is strong, and gives flavour to the entire game. I so enjoy this over other abstracts like Hive or Santorini where there is a theme, but it’s fairly pasted on. Here, the theme works with the mechanics, even if sometimes it’s a bit weird.
I’m incredibly excited to check out the other boxes to see what the game has in store for us. On one hand, it’s already fairly mind bendy when you are considering all the moves you can make on one board, plus the time travel element of jumping boards. Adding more complexity on top of 3d chess will make my brain hurt, but it’s a hurt that I’m so looking forward to.
The real challenge for me will be finding more opportunities to play two player games.
Content Warning: Assault, violence, dysphoria, transphobia, homophobia, deadnaming, bullying, cheating, use of slurs, suicidal thoughts, self-harm, public outing.
Stay Gold follows Pony, a senior finishing his high school experience at a new high school in Texas. A trans boy who has decided to go stealth, meaning he will keep his identity a secret. He left his old school because he was only known as ‘the transgendered one’. It’s difficult rebuilding yourself when everyone remembers who you used to be.
On the first day, Pony locks eyes with Georgina, a popular senior cheerleader, and there’s instant attraction between them. This is further accelerated when they find they are in every class together. Pony has to navigate the minefield of being honest and disclosing his identity with his desire to remain stealth for his final year of high school.
I liked that the story was told from first person of the two main characters, flipping back and forth between their perspectives. It felt good being inside the heads of both main characters. The author is trans as well, and many parts of this story felt real and personal. There was a lot of focus on how Pony felt when he was being mis-gendered, or when people would ask for his real name. “Pony is my real name” would be his response.
I felt like it was less of a book for trans people, and more of a book for those who have trans loved ones. There were some info dumps about some aspects of queer culture that anyone with basic experience would know, but having the internal dialogue of the main character is illuminating. A flippant aunt who dead names their niece, then hand-wave away the transgression, would benefit from this point of view. People who need to learn how important it is to recognize someone’s new identity.
Pony’s decision to be stealth is met with criticism from his best friend, out-and-loud Max, who pushes Pony to be more visible, and Pony’s sister Rocky, who has escaped Texas and moved to New York and found a community of like-minded individuals. Pony’s trans-ness causes friction with his father, who perpetually dead names and mis-genders him, causing more anxiety.
Stay Gold drives home the message of why trans people come out. Pony recalls how being forced to do things as a woman were pure agony, and even with the added complexities of navigating lies-by-omission, bathrooms, and painful binders, still feels right and good living in their own gender. Stay Gold serves as a really great introduction into the trans experience. It doesn’t go as deep into those issues as I would have liked, but we all have to start somewhere.
Near the end of the book, two characters are outed as lesbians at the homecoming dance. Pony announces that he’s transgender as a show of solidarity, and is promptly jumped in the bathroom, landing him in the hospital. What follows is the fairy-tale response. The perpetrators are thrown in jail, Georgina is moved by his bravery and chooses to throw her cares about her image to the wind, the community rallies behind Pony, raising thousands of dollars toward the top surgery he desperately needs, and even being named the homecoming king following a quick re-count. His father accepts his identity, his friends stick by his side, and a rally is thrown in his honour at the school.
I know I’m jaded, especially by events like the death of Nex Benedict, who was jumped in the bathroom, and later died, the world in general is failing to handle non-conforming people. The fairy tale ending just soured my experience on the book. It was a good read up to that point, but my disbelief flew out the window as everything resolved so perfectly for Pony. I understand why, it’s a comedy, not a tragedy. I wish the world would support people who have experienced such trauma with the immediate and fervent action that Stay Gold poses. Alas, I can’t really fault a romance story for being idyllic, can I?
We all have these games, right? The games we love to play, but for some reason or another, just CANNOT seem to earn a victory? Today I’m presenting the 5 games that I have with the most plays, and 0 wins. Here we go!
Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar – 4 plays
Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar by Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini is an incredibly interesting game. For those who said “gesundheit” after I said Tzolk’in, here’s the introduction. Tzolk’in is a worker placement game that features a series of gears on the main board. On your turn, you can either place one or more workers on the lowest spots on each of the outer gears, or pick up some or all of your workers. At the start of each round, the centre gear turns one space, which in turn rotates all the other gears. As your workers ride their gears, the actions they are able to preform get more and more lucrative. Sounds easy, right?
So why have I never won Tzolk’in? Really, at only 4 plays, it’s not the most outrageous claim. I will say that for a long time I harboured resentment to Tzolk’in and refused to play it. Only recently did I give it another chance and found some enjoyment in the system.
Tzolk’in is a slow strategy game. You really need to be planning 4 or 5 turns ahead, and orchestrate your grand move. Pulling all of your workers off their spots at the same time, and ensuring you have enough resources to do all that you want to do. Turns out, I’m not a very good coordinator.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Tzolk’in. The problem is me. And that I’m dumb. That’s about it.
Yokohama – 6 plays
Yokohama by Hisashi Hayashi, is a gorgeous game about running your president and merchants around the pyramid shaped town, while trying to earn goods and trade them for points. You drop merchants off all over the board, then move your president to one of the spots, and collect stuff based on how many merchants you had there. You can erect trading stalls for extra points and merchant power in future actions. There’s a ton of great mechanics going on in Yokohama that makes it a cool and interesting game. My challenge, lies in the fact that Bigfoot has won 5 of the 6 games I’ve played. Sometimes games just speak to certain people and they run away with it every time.
Evolution – 6 plays
Evolution by Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre, and Sergey Machin has a similar problem to Yokohama. Bear has won every single game I’ve played. In Evolution, players are growing and developing species to become the fattest of them all. By playing trait cards from their hand, they can either expand their species population, size, or spawn a whole new species all together. Of course, they can also play trait cards to each species to make them unique, to adapt to the world around them.
I quite enjoy Evolution, there are so many unique situations that come up just based on all the traits and how they get placed onto each of the cards. I don’t know how Bear does it, but he seems to stymie me no matter what strategy I try. If I play defensively, he manages to build an amazing food generating engine. If I become a carnivore, his creatures suddenly develop pack herding, and/or climbing, and/or hard shells, and I starve. If I’m the one who’s gorging at the watering hole, with a ton of amazing defences, out comes the intelligent carnivore who pokes the perfect holes in my defences.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that every strategy has a counter, and Bear is superbly proficient at finding the holes in my hard shell armour.
Hardback – 11 plays
This one is a bit of a sore spot for me. My wife and I both love Paperback by designer Tim Fowers, so when Hardback hit crowdfunding, I didn’t even hesitate. Both Paperback and Hardback are word based deck building games, but Hardback seems more in line with other deck building games like Star Realms, where the cards have suits and can synergize with one another. A few other very important differences between the two, Hardback has a push your luck element where you can draw extra cards from your deck, but you HAVE to include those cards in your word, and instead of having wild cards that clog up your deck, you can turn any of your hand cards backward and use it as a wild. Subtle, brilliant changes that make for an excellent follow-up.
Hot damn, has my wife figured this game out. I don’t really know what I’m doing wrong, but she kicks my butt 6 ways to Sunday. I’ve asked her what her strategy is, and she just says “get lots of points, quickly!”. Thanks for the tip…
Through the Ages (both versions) – 37 Plays
This is the one that surprised me the most. Through the Ages and its follow up Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization by designer Vlaada Chvatilis a brilliant civilization building game. Run entirely by cards, players draft technologies, wonders, and leaders to try to make their civilization the most cultured. There’s a fine balance to strike between generating enough food and ore to build your civilization, and earn science to develop it further. There’s a lot of spinning plates to manage in Through the Ages, and if you neglect even a single one, you’ll wind up paying for it.
The vast majorities of these plays have been via Board Game Arena, and I’ve played with at least half a dozen players, but no matter who I’m competing with, I’m routinely at the bottom of the pile. I’ve played the Android app dozens of times against the computers, and I do fairly well there! I just can’t seem to crush *ahem* I mean best any human opponents. Probably something to do with empathy or some other aspect of my personality that makes me unfit to be a warmonger.
And those are the 5 games that I have the most plays in, with absolutely 0 wins. What are the games that you just can’t seem to grasp a victory in?
Apparently 2024 is the year that I dive into Valdimr Suchy games. In the last 6 months I’ve played Pulsar 2849, Praga Caput Regni,Evacuation, and now, Woodcraft gets added to that pile as well. With this experience, I’m starting to get a feel for Valdimr’s designs. Medium-heavy euros with tight a tight economy, and an interesting action selection mechanism, and Woodcraft fits that definition incredibly well.
Learning Woodcraft isn’t terrible. I used both the rule book and the Game in a Nutshell How to Play video. Between the two, it wasn’t hard getting started. There were a few non-intuitive things, like the helpers all have production on them, but production doesn’t produce during an income phase. We all expected that would have been the case just due to the terminology, but no. gaining production is completely separate from income. There are a few other tedious rules, such as when you plant wood into your pots, you can take a free cutting action. This isn’t represented anywhere on the boards in a helpful manner, and I completely missed the rule in my excursion to learn the game.
In Woodcraft, players take on forest sprites who love to build beautiful creations out of wood. During the game you’ll buy and sell lumber, grow your own trees, hire assistants, collect tools to store in your attic, improve your workshop, and fulfill contracts. With only 14 rounds (13 in a 4 player game), your real task is to make every action count.
The contacts to fulfill generally have various wood requirements (3 different types of wood in the game, represented by green, yellow, and brown dice), and each wood has a pip value requirement that has to be met exactly. To do this, you’ll probably use the saw to cut a die into two, maintaining the sum of the original die, splice scrap wood to increment the pip value, and even glue two dice together to form a larger die.
It’s surprisingly fun to cleave dice into two, or stitch them back together to fulfill the contracts. Many of the contracts reward you with various goodies, sometimes even including more dice. There’s a great feedback loop of spending money to get resources, using the resources to fulfill contracts, which give you more money. Money in this context is blueberries.
Generally for a first play, I try to dip my toes into every mechanic. That said, Woodcraft is the kind of game where there are 5 different things you want to do, but you only have time to focus on 1 or 2 of them. You cannot do everything in Woodcraft, and the winner is probably going to be the person who does their one thing the best. At the end of our first game, one player managed to earn 3 tools, despite the attic having like, 12 spots to hold tools. Perhaps the next time I play, I’ll really try to focus on the attic and see how well it goes.
Woodcraft feels like a solo game. The interaction comes from someone taking contracts or helper cards before you, claiming public objectives before you, and selecting actions on the action wheel. The further back the action is on the wheel, the better the benefits you’ll receive for taking that action. It’s frustrating when the player right before you takes the action you wanted, gets the bonus benefits for it, then moves it up into the segment of the action wheel that doesn’t give you any benefits for playing it. Beyond that, you’re pretty free to run your own game.
I made a critical blunder in the middle of the game that probably cost me 2 whole turns to fix (representing about 15% of my entire game), which put me squarely into last place. As with most of Suchy’s games, the economy is tight. Every blueberry can be used, and taking an inefficient action can cause a terrible bottleneck that you need to dig yourself out from.
There’s a definite puzzle in the game of Woodcraft, that action efficiency challenge has me wanting to go back and get better. It’s not really a game that you can appreciate at a single play. I feel like the more you understand the levers and consequences at play in this game system, the more you’ll be rewarded with those sweet, sweet chestnuts (Points. Chestnuts are points). And that’s really why this is a first impressions post and not a full review. I have thoughts on Woodcraft, conflicted feelings, but I know there’s a lot more depth to plumb. I just don’t know if I’m going to put forth that investment to get good and find the joy in this tight puzzle.
