Tips agricola

Overview

Agricola (Revised Edition) is a worker placement game for 2-4 players which takes place over 14 rounds. Each player starts off with a 2-person family in a wooden hut, and throughout the game must develop their personal farm board by acquiring food and building resources, expanding their house, growing their family, plowing fields, growing crops, building pastures, collecting animals, and building improvements. At 6 different "harvests" in the game, crops will be harvested, each family member must be fed, and each animal type can breed. All farming categories are scored at the end of the game, most are on a scale from -1 to +4 victory points, where -1 represents failing to fulfill a farming category and +4 represents reaching the maximum threshold of a farming category. At the end of the Round 14 harvest, the player with the most points wins.

Strategy

Agricola is a game with deep strategic depth, and rewards long-term planning as well as clever action sequences. Because each family member has one action every round, growing one's family to have more actions is almost always an important step to victory. However, the requirement to feed each family member 2 food each harvest is extremely important and means that a player should not grow a family too large to reliably feed (as repeated starvation is not a plausible path to victory.) The need to feed family members, while also building a room or more to grow more family members, should be most players' main priority in the first 4-7 rounds of an Agricola game. The diversification of farming activities is often most efficiently delayed until the middle rounds of the game.

The Occupation and Minor Improvement cards in Agricola are often the key to finding one's best long-term plan to score points. Many of the best cards are ones that provide strong sources of wood, food, bonus points, or saved/extra actions while not having a large cost. Cards give the player extra efficiencies and should absolutely be taken advantage of, but it can be inefficient to focus too heavily on playing cards while not giving oneself the time in game to take advantage of all the card effects. Just because a card can be played, does not mean it should be played.

The most critical resource types in Agricola vary based on player count due to the differences in available action spaces. In 2-player games, clay and access to food are most critical. In 3-player games, reed and food can sometimes be limiting factors. In 4-player games, wood and access to Family Growth are usually most important.