Agricola

When I was in the US back in June, I went on a bit of a buying frenzy for board games. Here in Australia, most are significantly more expensive and infrequently go on sale. I was particularly interested in getting Agricola because it’s one of the higher-priced board games being sold right now. I ended up doing a lot of running around to get this, reserving a copy at a Dallas games shop when it wasn’t in stock . It was quite annoying to later discover that Barnes and Noble had plenty of copies in stock all along. I didn’t find my way to B&N until the latter part of my visit and it never occurred to me they would be carrying board games even though I had been to Border’s which did carry some titles.

When I returned home, I was literally sick and tired for several weeks and we only ended up learning to play a couple of the games during that time. Further down the track, we did make some attempts at learning some of the others but the learning part would take so long we’d abandon play before we properly got into them. I spent a lot of time reading the manual for Agricola during this time but we never had the time to learn to play. Last night, I suggested we finally give it a shot and that’s when the fun started.

Although I had read the rules a number of times, it’s often quite difficult to work out the play until you actually do it. We started to set it up and realised our coffee table simply wasn’t big enough to accomodate all the boards and pieces, so moved to the kitchen table. Set up was more difficult than we expected due to some pieces not quite matching the illustrations/instructions. Game play was also quite difficult to work out. It is recommended that newcomers play the family version to start, moving on to the full game once basic game play is understood. Unfortunately, the instructions are mostly geared to the full game, with only a few notes posted on the family version of the games. After much frustration, I looked online and discovered a video explanation lasting a half-hour. The Scientist and I watched while the boys disappeared for a while. Afterwards, the Scientist had a good idea of what we needed to do and I was halfway there. So we finally started and muddled through the various rounds of the game. Game Fanatic was thoroughly overwhelmed and pretty much just went through the motions for the latter part of the game. By that point, he had managed to acrue enough negative points to leave him well out of any chance of winning so he had just given up. Lego Lover enjoyed playing even though he also ended with negative points due to difficulties in managing the multiple facets of the game. I just managed to keep to positive points and the Scientist did somewhat better than me.  It was quite late by the time we finished and we were pretty exhausted after having our mental faculties so heavily taxed.  I think we will enjoy this a lot more the next time we play.