Agricola (board game)
The box cover of Agricola
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| Designer(s) | Uwe Rosenberg |
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| Publisher(s) |
Mayfair Games Lookout Games (Germany) Z-Man Games (U.S.) 999 Games (Netherlands) Homolúdicus (Spain) |
| Players | 1 to 5 |
| Age range | 12 and up |
| Setup time | 5–10 minutes |
| Playing time | 30–60 minutes per player |
| Random chance | Low (Cards) |
| Skill(s) required | Economic management, Resource management, Strategic thought |
Agricola is a Euro-style board game created by Uwe Rosenberg. It is a worker placement game with a focus on resource management. In Agricola, players are farmers that sow, plow the fields, collect wood, build stables, buy animals, expand their farms and feed their families. After 14 rounds players calculate their score based on the size and prosperity of the household.
The game was published by Lookout Games and released at Spiel 2007, where it was voted second-best game shown at the convention, according to the Fairplay in-show voting. The game was released in English by Z-Man Games in July 2008.Playdek released an iOS conversion of the game in June 2013. A second edition of Agricola was published by Mayfair Games in May 2016.
Agricola won the Spiel des Jahres special award for "Best complex game 2008" and the 2008 Deutscher Spiele Preis.
It was also the game which ended Puerto Rico's run of more than five years as the highest-rated game on the board game website BoardGameGeek, staying at the top of the rankings between September 2008 and March 2010. As of 2016, Agricola is ranked 11th among all board games on BoardGameGeek.
Players start the game with a farming couple living in a two roomed hut. Each round, they take turns to place their family members on action spaces to get resources and improve and grow their households. Only one family member can occupy each action space within the same round, so players need to time their actions to get maximum profit while denying progress to the opponents.
The game is played in 14 rounds, divided by 6 harvests. At each harvest, people are fed, food is grown, and animals multiply. Players lose victory points if they have trouble feeding their family, which makes food production a major point of tension in the game.
At the end of round 14 comes the final harvest after which victory points are counted. Scoring in Agricola rewards a middle of the road strategy. Players are penalized for not focusing on any one aspect of the game, and stop scoring in any area they focus on too much. The player with the most balanced and prosperous farm wins.
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