AGRICOLA - Family Edition

After the overwhelming popularity of 2007’s Agricola, it was only a matter of time before Uwe Rosenberg provided a ‘family’ version. And sure enough, Agricola: Family Edition provides exactly that. It’s a streamlined, family-weight variant of the classic worker placement game. Once again, players get to build their own farm… Many things remain the same, in parallel to Agricola. You start with two farmer workers, one for each room of your starter farmhouse. Each round you send these out to locations to do actions, or pick up supplies. Some locations are ‘accumulation’ spots, where goods get placed at the start of each round. These build up over time if no one claims them, making them rather appealing later on! You’ll aim to collect wood to build fenced pastures so you can keep and breed livestock in them. You’ll want to plough fields grow wheat (and, later on, to feed your workers). If you increase the size of your farmhouse, you can get more workers to live there!

There’s fourteen rounds to this game, which again is Euro-style in nature (most points wins). After certain rounds there’s a harvest. You have to feed your workers, your fields produce wheat, and your animals breed. So far, so Agricola. But a major difference here is that players don’t have their own restrictive player mat. You add (pasture, building and farmhouse) tiles adjacent to your starting house. Also, while new action spots get added each round, these are always in a predetermined order. (They get added in a relative shuffled order, in regular Agricola). There are no Occupation/Minor Improvement cards in this version, either.

There’s no punishment for not fulfilling certain categories like in Agricola. This is a ‘Family Edition’, after all! You score points for having animals, wheat in your fields, and many other things. Agricola: Family Edition is a lighter, quicker version of Agricola, ideal for younger or less experienced board gamers.