unique_name_123 gave me: computer, spirituality, laurel, rules, games, travel, artichoke.

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alaricmacconnal

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( so what happened? )

The description from BoardGameGeek starts:

In Agricola, you're a farmer in a wooden shack with your spouse and little else. On a turn, you get to take only two actions, one for you and one for the spouse, from all the possibilities you'll find on a farm: collecting clay, wood, or stone; building fences; and so on. You might think about having kids in order to get more work accomplished, but first you need to expand your house. And what are you going to feed all the little rugrats?

At set points during the game there are harvests: you take grain or vegetables from your sown fields, must feed your family (if you have a fireplace you can cook animals or vegetables for this), and then can increase your flocks/herds (if you have enough fenced pastures to hold them). As you increase your family you need more food and as the game goes on the harvests get closer together.

Scoring is based on how well you did in several factors, and, like all optimization games, you have to choose which ones to pursue and which ones to accept lower scores for. You lose points if you didn't touch a category at all (for example if you had no plowed fields or no grain). Points are given for plowed fields, fenced pastures, three different types of livestock, two different crops, upgrades to your house, and number of family members, and some improvements also give points. So you'll find yourself facing quandries like "if I don't get a vegetable to sow I'll lose points for that, but if I blow that off I could build this improvement that'll be worth points, but it requires materials I might not be able to get in time".

I find that the cards add a lot of variety to the game without adding a lot of complexity. When I play Puerto Rico I'll probably settle into one of the established strategies (corn king, builder, variety, etc), depending on what the other players are doing. In Caylus (which I have not played as much) there also seem to be some basic strategies that players fall into, again depending on what others are doing. All of that is true of Agricola too, but the occupations and improvements in your hand can play a big role in this, so, at least so far, it feels like there are more strategies available. Or maybe it's just that the tactics are more varied. Either way, I'd like to play more.

The game is played on a map covering the middle east, Europe, northern Africa, and Asia through the Indian subcontinent. Cities, towns, and spots in the seas are marked and connected via lines; these indicate legal movement. Players (who are assigned character names like Ali Baba) move around this board fulfilling quests and seeking adventure, which can alter your scores on two tracks (destiny and story), bring new skills, bring treasure, and cause status changes like "wounded" or "blessed" or "married" or "grief-stricken". Ultimately the winner is determined by the destiny and story points; the rest serves to affect your adventures along the way.

After you move you draw a card from the encounter deck, which typically has a noun like "sorceror" and a number. This number is looked up on a table against which you roll a die, which results in an adjective like "angry" or "friendly" or "foolish". You can choose one of about 8-10 actions from a list (there are several different lists; the table tells you which to use), like "aid" or "question" or "hide" or "attack". The table cell where the adjective and the action meet produces a cross-reference into the big book of stories. (There's another die roll that can tweak this cross-reference a bit, so it's not completely predictable.) Someone else then reads the corresponding entry, which provides a usually-entertaining narrative of what happens. Sometimes this is affected by the skills your character has or further decisions you get to make. This entry also gives you a resolution such as "story +1 and wounded" (you got a good story to tell but it hurt along the way).

For the most part characters do not interact, though they can under some circumstances. What keeps this from being parallel solitaire, though, is that at least three people are involved in each turn: the player, the person to his right (who does the table lookups), and the player to his left (who reads from the book of stories). This sounds tedious (and cries out for a software adaptation), but it really wasn't bad once we got the hang of it. Players not engaged in any of this were helping to pull out the right status cards or skill chits as needed, manage treasures and quests, and so on.

The game rules seem to assume that you'll run through the deck of encounter cards two or three times, but even with six players we only barely started the second time. (I think we drew three cards after reshuffling the discard pile.) I don't know if we were supposed to be having more encounters, but there didn't seem to be a lot of ways to call down additional ones. Maybe players are supposed to try to interfere with each other more, but again, there aren't a lot of opportunities for that. Though I note that an unfortunate encounter with a disgruntled wizard cost me the win by giving control of my movements to another player for two turns. I had already satisfied the victory condition in points, but you have to end the game in Baghdad. When I wrested control back I was somewhere in India, IIRC. Oops.

I forgot to time it, but I think our game was around four or five hours, including teaching. That's a lot longer than the two hours advertised on the box, but four of us were completely new to the game and the other two had played a few times. I think our next game would be a lot faster, but with six players who've played once or twice I'd plan on three hours, not two. I would definitely play this again.

( Imperial, Settlers (and what's with these weird pieces?), Puerto Rico, Pandemic )

( Incan Gold, Pandemic expansion, Merchant of Venus, Rum and Pirates, San Juan, Trans America )

This is a cooperative game for up to four players (all of our games had four so I can't speak to the experience with fewer players). Each player has a specialization; more about those in a bit. The team is trying to find cures for four diseases before they spread out of control. You win by finding the cures; you lose by having too many outbreaks, by having any disease run so rampant that you run out of its markers, or by exhausting the deck of cards without winning. The game starts with several infected cities; at the end of each player's turn two more cities will be drawn from the "infections" deck and infected as well. Every now and then an epidemic breaks out; a new city (from the bottom of the deck) gets a disease and then all the discarded infection cards get shuffled and put on top. That means that cities that have been infected once are more likely to be infected again, which has the right feel to it.

Players can spend actions (four per turn) to move, cure a single disease token (in the city they're in), build research centers (help with travel and required for finding a cure), or work on finding a cure. Finding a cure requires accumulating sets of cards, which are drawn each turn; there is a limited mechanism for passing cards, and one of the player roles (the researcher) can pass cards more freely (that's its special ability). The other roles are the scientist (requires fewer cards to cure), the dispatcher (can move other people on his turn and can bring people together without the normal constraints), the operations expert (can build research centers for free), and the medic (can heal cities more effectively). I played three games, playing researcher, the medic, and the dispatcher. I enjoyed all the games, and while it had appeared in the first two games that playing the dispatcher would be boring, it was not.

The calibration of the game (we played at the first two levels of difficulty) felt pretty good, neither too easy nor too hard. In the last game we were prepared to win on the very last turn, until the single card that would have caused us to lose came up in the infections deck. Oops.

Other games I played, all of which I think I've written about before, were Trans America (filler), Rum & Pirates, Puerto Rico (three players, four-point spread among scores), and Carcassonne. Other games that were played (this might not be a complete list) were Imperial, Dominion, El Grande, and Hermagore. Pandemic and Dominion got played multiple times by different groups. Belatedly I realized I could have given up a Pandemic slot to let a new person play; I jumped into Pandemic when the choices were that and Arkham Horror (decent game but too visually-challenging for me late in the day), but then the other group decided to play something else instead and I didn't think to move. Oh well; didn't mean to be greedy with the new game.

We had some cancellations and were down five people (from planned) for dinner. Non-sandwich suggestions for leftover lunch meats would be welcome. (No combining with cheese or milk, though, so pizza, lasagna, etc are out.) We'll eat sandwiches too, but I'd like some variety. I think scrambling the pastrami in eggs would be good; I don't have good instincts for the roast beef (would stir-frying it with veggies work?) and turkey breast.

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One of our guests was temporarily in a wheelchair due to a broken leg (sounded like a bad break from her description), which I didn't know in advance. (I knew about the disability, but thought she was on crutches.) Most of our first floor did not pose problems, and it's good to know that a wheelchair does fit through one doorway I thought questionable. I'm not sure how she managed the powder room; that might have required using structural features (like the sink) as supports (lean on this and hop over). I guess it's an improvement over my previous house, which had no first-floor restroom at all, but it reminded me that we still have accessibility barriers even setting aside the steps one must use to get into the house in the first place.

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