Agricola review: "The quintessential worker placement farming board game"

12 years after the original release, I've been trying my hand at Uwe Rosenberg's legendary farming strategy board game, Agricola – the 2016 Revised Edition to be exact. As a staple for Eurogamers, this is a board game that helped set an incredible precedent as far as worker placement style engine builders were concerned, but how does it stand up nowadays?

Agricola now sits in a well-harvested landscape that sees most of the best board games offering rulesets far more vast, and many of which have taken inspiration from Agricola, having remedied its less-desirable features. However, it's thanks to the fantastic foundation that games like Agricola have laid down for the genre over the years that Eurogames are in the popular and intensely competitive state they are today. The most obvious spiritual successor for Agricola is Rosenburg's own Caverna – a Dwarf-themed farming game that now ranks slightly higher on BoardGameGeek. Others in the genre, like Doggerland, all take cues from this game with their own interesting twists.

While it's important to note that no board game design exists in a vacuum, the breadth of competition today hasn't diluted the experience of playing Agricola in today's landscape, but instead given me a history lesson around both Eurogames as a whole, and farming history, too. What we're looking at here is a pure and very broad dive into the turning cogs of rural life. I've even come out the other side having learned a thing or two about agriculture, though it's not a game without flaws. Let's do some groundwork and take a look at how this iconic farming game sews its strategic seeds.

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Agricola features & design

• Make babies and feed your people when harvest comes around
• Improve your farmstead, building new rooms and pens for your animals
• Employ workers and learn new technologies to gain boons

Agricola is your quintessential worker placement farming board game. Players compete to design the most efficient farm, while feeding a growing throng of workers, breeding farm animals, and improving their engines with new occupations, improvements, and buildings, among other things.

In Agricola, play takes place over 14 rounds, with players only needing to feed their workers when they hit the harvest phases in rounds 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 14. This is where it all kicks off, harvesting your grain and vegetables to feed your people who each need 2 food to make it through to the next harvest. Can't feed your people? You'll need to take a scarcity token. That'll harm your overall point score, which is dictated by how well you've improved your farm.

The game begins with each player placing their two starter workers in the little house on their player board, taking some food, and grabbing a hand of seven occupation cards. A round consists of several phases. The prep phase involves drawing a new action card to add to the board – which already features a few starter action spaces – and adding resources to accumulation spaces. The two major types of space to choose from during the work phase are action and accumulation spaces. Action spaces do the same thing every round (such as letting you plow a field, renovate your house, or go fishing), whereas accumulation spaces contain stacks of goods (like wood and stone) that grow by the same number each round, whether they're harvested or not.

Moving around the table clockwise, players place their meeples one-by-one on action spaces depending on what you're looking to achieve that round, with only a single meeple allowed on each space. Action spaces are resolved immediately, as opposed to waiting for a later phase to enact everything. Players continue to place their meeples until they have none left, even after other players have run out.

Throughout Agricola, you can gain bonuses from certain improvements such as the open pool of major improvements, each with an associated resource cost. You might build a Joinery to process wood into food during play, or leftover wood into points at the end of the game. Alternatively, a brick fireplace will let you cook your goods, multiplying them so you can feed more of your people, which you might replace with a cooking hearth later down the line without (somehow) paying any more resources.

There are a whole host of minor improvements, too, which are randomly drawn into your hand through the use of certain action spaces and played to change the rules of the game in different ways, for both yourself and other players. This could net you anything from resources when someone else harvests, to a Crooked Plow that lets you plow three fields instead of one when using an action space. Many of these come with prerequisites, and combos can see incredible boons start to form if you draw and play cards well. Similarly, Occupation cards allow you to outsource animal tamers, bricklayers, and even charcoal burners to help your farm thrive.

When it comes to looks, the illustration style starts to look a little drab against the incredible painterly styles of a lot of Eurogames on shelves today. Thankfully a gorgeous special edition exists, complete with sculpted boar, cow, and sheep minis. However, that does mean the older editions are likely to get left by the wayside for those concerned chiefly with aesthetics.

Gameplay

• Broad spec is encouraged
• Lean into wild, randomly drawn strategies for massive boons
• Intensity curve is immense for 3-4 players

Learning Agricola fully takes time. You'll likely play it wrong the first time, but that's ok. The replay factor works to accommodate missteps, and it's nowhere near as weighty as something like Scythe. Make a couple of mistakes in the late game or fail to feed your people one harvest, however, and it's all over for you.

As you move through the rounds in Agricola, you'll start to form strategies that harmonise with the cards you've been dealt, and work around what you suspect other players are doing. There's a bit of diplomacy going on under the surface as you try to avoid stepping on each other's toes… because farmers walking similar paths are likely to clash when it comes to resource acquisition.

As you play, new action spaces provide further opportunities to play out your strategy, while accumulation spaces increase the stakes encouraging some push-your-luck style play. Since they continue to produce resources every round, you can end up with a mountain of resources in one space that starts to look mighty tasty, even if you're not in need of wood.

The rulebook itself notes that "Cultivation is tedious." That's especially true when you've spent the last three turns grinding on a certain strategy only for someone to step in and steal the one resource you needed that round to make everything fall into place. That means you need to be ready to adapt.

It's this adaptive play that's the real meat of Agricola. While you're at first encouraged to go broad due to the scoring system threatening minus points for overlooking certain additions to your farm, the wide-ranging improvements and occupations really serve to shake things up and provide an amazing amount of replayability. What it does mean, is that it's harder to lean into specific strategies because refusing to engage with cards will likely give other players the upper hand.

As you play, Agricola has the potential to become intensely competitive due to the increasing number of babies being produced, and the one-meeple-per-space rule. Attempts to curb this intense competition in 3-4 player games comes in the form of four extra action spaces attached to the board from the start, which give players more options should they run out. And while it does serve to reduce the tension, there's still a massive increase in the likelihood of your strategy being thwarted. With a lot of high-stakes and indirect take-that action, the game is an intense one with lots of players.

Should you buy Agricola?

As much as Agricola is a game with a fair bit of agency, it relies very heavily on luck – luck that the space you need won't be taken up by another player, or luck that you'll draw a great combo of minor improvement and occupation cards. While the heavy lean into unpredictability helps to support a historically accurate representation of the highly competitive and often unstable world of agriculture, it often sees players backed into a corner.

This, combined with the point detriments for overlooking certain aspects of farming means you're forced to follow either the broad strategy of "grab one of everything so you don't get hit with penalties", or follow an impossible-to-predict tech tree. Get that card combo flowing and you're in for a great time, but those who get a bad hand or just don't engage with their card hand are likely to be left in the dust by other players.

Agricola is a game of rags to riches. It challenges players to make the most of the hand they're dealt, and encourages them to expand into as many niches as possible. It's certainly a game for players who enjoy backtracking through tactical steps from a self-imposed goal, but that joy is often turned to dismay in games with high player counts thanks to the intense hike in competition for action spaces.

At two players, it's a relatively calm board game session, but at four players that tranquility drops significantly, with the stress of ruined strategies turning it into a very different experience for me. That is not to say Agricola isn't a masterful addition to the genre, but it's one for players who don't mind adapting a long-thought-out strategy at a moment's notice.

Ratings

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

How we tested Agricola

We played Agricola numerous times with different player counts over a course of weeks to get the most complete overview of its gameplay and longevity. I made sure to attempt different tactics, to test if it was more weighted toward one strategy.

For a more in-depth look at our process, see this guide on how we test board games. You can also find out more via GamesRadar+ reviews policy.

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