Agricola Board Game Review
Agricola is an agricultural farming board game designed by Uwe Rosenberg, in the vein of the German-style strategy board games. Players control a plot of farmland, and compete to create the most balanced farm consisting of various types of vegetables and animals.
Agricola took the gaming world by storm when it was released at the Spiel convention in 2007, and won the Spiel des Jahres award for Best Complex Game in 2008. It has been consistently popular since then, and is still the second most popular board game out there, as measured by the popular board game website BoardGameGeek. It has even managed to take the number one spot away from Puerto Rico for a while.
The objective in Agricola is to build the best and most-balanced farm after 14 turns. You score the most points for having a farm with a big family and sturdy buildings, and efficiently using all your available farmland to plant vegetables and raise animals. This is not quite that simple to achieve however, since you start with just a farmer and his wife, with only a 2-room farmhouse, and there will be other players who are going to try to grab the resources to improve their own farms too!
In the 14 turns of gameplay, there are a number of actions that you can do to grow your farm. You can grab supplies of resources such as wood and clay, and agricultural resources such as vegetables, fish and animals to lay the foundations of your farm. You can also plough and sow your fields, or fence them up, or bake some bread to feed your family. You can also grow your family when the time is right.
Which action you choose (and when you choose it) will ultimately determine how successfully you grow your farm. However, it won’t be possible to choose an action whenever you want it. Once a player has taken a particular action, that action is no longer available till the next turn. So you will need to plan which actions are the most crucial for your strategy and focus on them, and you will also need to be flexible and alter your strategy in case the other players take an action you need. In addition, you can take a number of actions each turn equal to the number of family members you have, so a big family is crucial. But you’ll have to make sure you are able to house and feed those extra kids before you can grow your family.
The resource market in Agricola is also quite interesting. There are actions where you can grab resources such as building materials, food, vegetables and animals. These resources replenish each turn at a set rate, and can pile up if a player doesn’t grab them the previous turn. You could therefore wait for resources to pile up before you use an action to grab them. Or you could do the opposite and monopolize a resource market. For example, you could keep taking all the wood, and by doing so you would prevent the other players from building fences or wooden buildings. (You might also end up having too much wood, but that is beside the point…)
What makes Agricola such a great game is its endless replay value. Besides having the standard actions, each player also gets a random hand of occupations and minor improvements that they can play. These cards provide benefits that will impact how your play. For example, you might have a shepherd occupation that provides you with extra sheep, causing you to change your strategy to make sheep your primary source of food.
These occupation and minor improvement cards also perform another function that makes Agricola a game for everyone. If you want to play it as a family game with children, you can use the easy deck of cards which provides bonuses that are easy to grasp. You can use a more complex deck with more interesting effects for players with more gaming experience. Or you could use an interactive deck where players can benefit from other players’ actions or even steal resources from each other!
As mentioned above, Agricola has such a strong appeal because it can cater for playing groups of varying ages and gaming experience. The game is playable with 1 to 5 players, and games usually take about two hours, providing enough complexity without eating up too much of your time. It appears to be the best farming strategy game currently available, and deserves its spot as one of the most popular board games out there!
- Complexity: 4.0/5.0
- Playing Time: 2.0 to 2.5 hours
- Number of Players: 1 to 5 players
You can read more about Agricola at http://boardgames.gamepudding.com/r/agricola.html
Steven maintains the board game review website at http://boardgames.gamepudding.com/ – a website devoted to the best and latest board and card games. Read reviews, game descriptions, related information and more.
Original Article Source: ArticleBase.com
Acquire Board Game Review
Acquire is a classic business strategy board game that has been going strong since 1962. Using nothing but your wealth and wits, you must vie against other business magnates in this game of mergers and acquisitions – buying, trading, and selling stocks in the world’s biggest hotel chains in order to get the greatest return on your investments.
Acquire was designed by Sid Sackson in 1962, and has been among the most popular board games in its many versions since those days. Part of its long-lasting appeal is its simplicity and the ease in learning how to play it. The game comes with just a board, tiles, company counters, stock cards and cash. And the gameplay all boils down to just two actions: placing tiles and buying shares.
Although the basics of Acquire are pretty simple, there is a fair amount of challenge in deciding where you place your tiles and which shares you buy. Since there are other players trying to make their millions as well, you have to be very strategic in your decisions to ensure you profit from them much more than your competitors do. It wouldn’t be in your best interests to hand another player a cool grand!
Placing tiles is how you start, grow and merge hotel companies in Acquire. And the board is a representation of the “business playing field”, where you can see how each hotel chain can grow and merge. When you create a group of 2 or more adjacent tiles, you are in essence starting a new company. When you place a new tile next to an existing company, you are growing that company. When the tile you place connects 2 separate companies, you have merged those 2 companies.
The other part of the game is buying shares. Having shares in a company means you have partial ownership of it and can profit if it grows or merges. When a company grows, its share value grows as well, benefiting its owners. And when a company is acquired by a bigger company, its owners get bonuses and can trade in their stock in the defunct company for shares in the larger company.
The last 2 paragraphs describe pretty much all the mechanics in the game, but what makes Acquire so interesting is the amount of strategy required to be able to use those simple mechanics effectively. You’ll have to worry about liquidity; buying lots of shares early is good, but if your company doesn’t get merged, you end up with not enough cash to use later on. You’ll also have to worry about majority shareholders; the player with the most shares in a company gets a huge bonus when that company gets merged.
There will be a lot of maneuvering in each game. Players will be jockeying to be the majority shareholder in companies that are about to get merged. You can even withhold the crucial tile that would merge two companies until you are in a position to take advantage of that merge. The amount of strategy involved is surprising considering the simplicity of the game rules and objectives.
There are a couple of issues with the game though that might detract from the enjoyment of playing it. Unfortunately, ingame cash is both the main method of buying shares, and the main form of scoring. Therefore, the player who is lucky enough to profit from the first few merges may turn out to be a runaway leader because he can use that cash advantage to generate an even bigger lead in both cash and endgame scoring. That dependence on initial luck and the crucial first merges might not be attractive to some players.
A major part of the appeal of Acquire is the fact that it can be taught to new players in less than 10 minutes, since the basic rules are so simple. This easy learning curve, together with all the advanced business strategy that can be used by experienced players, makes this an enduring game that has unsurprisingly remained strong for nearly 50 years! The game can be played by between 3 and 6 players, and games typically last between 1 and 1.5 hours.
- Complexity: 3.0/5.0
- Playing Time: 1.0 to 1.5 hours
- Number of Players: 3 to 6 players
You can read more about Acquire at http://boardgames.gamepudding.com/r/acquire.html
Steven maintains the board game review website at http://boardgames.gamepudding.com/ – a website devoted to the best and latest board and card games. Read reviews, game descriptions, related information and more.
Original Article Source: ArticleBase.com
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Dominion Card Game Review
Dominion is a fast-paced card game in which you race and fight with other monarchs in your quest to gain control of as much land as possible. To do this, you will hire minions, construct buildings, spruce up your castle, and fill the coffers of your treasury. All in the name of creating the largest Dominion in the known world!
You are a monarch, like your parents before you, a ruler of a small pleasant kingdom of rivers and evergreens. Unlike your parents however, you have hopes and dreams! You want a bigger and better kingdom, with more rivers and trees. You want a Dominion! In all directions lie fiefs, freeholds, and feodums. All are small bits of land, controlled by petty lords and verging on anarchy. You will bring civilization to these people, uniting them under your banner. But several other monarchs have had the exact same idea. You must race to get as much of the unclaimed land as possible, fending your competition off along the way.
In Dominion, each player starts with an identical, very small deck of cards representing the starting power of their nation. In the center of the table is a selection of other cards such as money, land, minions and buildings that you can buy. Through your selection of cards to buy, and how you play your hands as you draw them, you construct your deck on the fly, striving for the most efficient path to the land cards which contain the victory points needed to win the game.
The gameplay in Dominion is pretty unique, yet is a surprisingly simple concept to learn. The core of the game is deck construction: building your deck of cards as you progress through the game, creating a fine-tuned engine that will help you accumulate the most victory points by the end.
You start each round with a handful of cards from your customized and in-progress deck. In order for you to win the game, you have to make sure that the hands that you draw are efficient and effective. You do that by buying cards from the set of cards available on the table, each of which costs a certain amount of copper (ingame cash) to buy. As an example, it would not be wise to buy land cards (that give you victory points) early in the game, since they will just clog up your hand and prevent you from buying more cards or playing powerful actions.
The available stacks of cards on the table usually contain a whole variety of card types. I say “usually” because 10 of those stacks are randomly selected from a much larger pool of cards, allowing for more replay value. You will have 3 types of land cards with different victory point amounts and 3 types of treasury cards that provide different amounts of cash. And the 10 random cards may include passive action cards, attack cards, reaction cards and cards that last for long durations.
These cards will have a huge variety of effects that you can use to advance your strategy. You could buy cards that allow you to perform more actions, or cards that will let you draw more cards, or even cards that provides you with more cash in order to buy the very expensive cards. You could get attack cards that will interfere with your opponents’ strategy. There’s nothing wrong with stealing money from your opponents or forcing them to discard good cards. After all, all’s fair in love and land-grabbing!
In the end, the player who constructs and uses his deck most efficiently will be able to accumulate the most amount of land and win the game. As you can tell, there is a lot of randomness in Dominion, from the random cards that are used to set the table to the randomness of your hand draws. This is therefore not a game where you can plan the perfect opening move etc, and might not appeal to every player. It is however a game that can be learnt and mastered very quickly, and a great way of easing new players into the Eurogames which require more strategy and planning.
Overall, Dominion introduces a great concept in constructing your own play deck. With a couple of expansions already in hand (and with more to come), a whole lot of interesting cards are added to the mix all the time. With so many available cards with interesting abilities, each combination of cards will create a whole new type of game with different strategies, keeping the game fresh and entertaining. In addition, games very seldom last more than an hour, making it a great game for that odd hour of spare time.
- Complexity: 2.5/5.0
- Playing Time: 30 to 45 minutes
- Number of Players: 2 to 4 players (up to 6 with the Intrigue expansion)
You can read more about Dominion at http://boardgames.gamepudding.com/r/dominion.html
Steven maintains the board game review website at http://boardgames.gamepudding.com/ – a website devoted to the best and latest board and card games. Read reviews, game descriptions, related information and more.
Original Article Source: ArticleBase.com
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