Agricola: Farmers of the Moor

Agricola: Farmers of the Moor is the first expansion to Agricola, and as mentioned before on my blog, I was not expecting this to be available in English at Essen this year. To my delight, however, Z-Man games pulled through and had it available for €25, and thus it was with a big smile on my face that I came home from day 1 with my copy.

Sadly, I didn’t take Agricola with me to Germany, and it was not until 2 weeks after Essen that I got my first opportunity to test it out. We played with 4 players, and below are my thoughts on the game. The review assumes you are familiar with the base game. I apologise for the quality of image, I forgot my camera and had to make do with the facilities provided by my mobile phone.

Setup

The setup for the expansion is fairly straightforward if you’re comfortable setting up the original Agricola. There are 14 new Major Improvements, 10 of which sit underneath the original Major Improvements, and 4 which sit on 2 new spaces provided by new boards. The idea behind this “stacking” seems to be to force players to take the original MaIs to work through the stacks and get to the new ones. The drawback to the approach is that, as new players, we weren’t familiar with the cards and therefore didn’t really appreciate what it was we were missing out on.

As well as the new Major Improvements, there’s also a new “Infirmary” space to add to the board. This space becomes an action space available throughout the game (more on this later). The expansion provides 3 “levels” of complexity to the rules, of which we played the 3rd; the most complex. In essence, this is the full game of Agricola with all the additions of the expansion, which provides new Minor Improvements (but no new Occupations) which are dealt out with those from the base game in a pre-defined ratio (3 from the base game, 4 from the expansion).

The main addition to the game, which all the improvements are there to supplement, is the addition of Moor and Forest tiles. At the start of the game, each player is dealt a different board layout card. This card mandates a specific arrangement of forest, moor and room tiles on the player’s board. Every player has a different layout, which will affect their strategy going forward as they decide how to best make use of their farm’s natural environment. Despite the differences in layout, each player starts with the same: 2 wooden rooms as per the base game, 3 moor and 5 forest tiles.

Finally, there are a number (which various depending on players) of “special action” cards placed alongside the main boards.

Brrr, it used to be cold

Part of the theme in Agricola is that life was tough and food hard to come by. It took hard work to establish a regular source of food before a family could decide to expand with children and a larger house. Farmers of the Moor adds a new dimension to this struggle in the form of heating. At each harvest, a player not only has to feed his family, but also heat his domicile; 1 energy per room.

Energy is, in general, obtained from the new forest and moor tiles. For each “turn” in a round, a player must now choose either to take an action as normal or a “special” action. Special actions do not require a person token to use, and allow farmers to cut down trees or harvest peat, which can in turn be converted to energy. Wood (either from trees or collected elsewhere) can always be converted to energy, so players are not forced to take these special actions.

The penalty for not heating your home is the loss of players for the next round, described in the rules as “bed instead of beg”. An unheated home leads to illness resulting in people whose only available action in the following round is to visit the infirmary. You do gain a food for this though.

Changes in mechanic and dynamic

Whilst a standard draughty wooden hut requires 1 energy per harvest to heat, there are benefits of -1 and -2 energy requirements for building a more heat-retentive clay or stone hut respectively. This changes plans over the base game slightly, encouraging players to upgrade their houses sooner rather than later, compared to my standard strategy of 2 renovations in the closing round or 2.

The addition of special actions adds an extra dimension of player interaction and “chicken” to gameplay. In the base game, unless playing with the ‘I’ deck, player interaction is largely limited to the order in which players take actions. Special actions, which don’t use up a person token to play on, require an extra element of “if I take this, will the action I want be gone by my next turn”.

Special actions cost nothing for the first player to take each one each round, and 2 food for the second. Each card can only be used by 2 players each round, so there is still vying and competition for these actions between players. Furthermore, a player must have at least 1 remaining person token to play in a round to be allowed to take a special action, so the order of taking actions vs special actions becomes important. It’s very easy to forget to take a special action before running out of people or not realise you’re the last player and not take a free special action. I guess these are beginner mistakes that would soon iron out, but we got caught out by them a few times in the first play.

Resources seem easier to come by in this game; partially through players concentrating on peat/forests, and partly through the additional resources provided via special actions/the new Minor Improvements. I was able to amass unprecedentedly large quantities of wood in quite a short space of time in this game, although the dynamic always various based on number of players, and 4 is not a number I have played often.

Another addition to the expansion is the new animal: horses. Horses didn’t play a large part in my first play, so it’s hard to write too much about them. They are obtainable as one of the special actions, and count for 1 point each (no limit) during scoring. A number of the new Major Improvements revolve around horses, and it’s a shame we didn’t concentrate on them too much. They did provide benefits to myself personally through the Peat Charcoal Kiln improvement, which gained me an extra fuel every time I “cut peat”.

Strategy, what strategy?

For the first few rounds of the game, I tried a strategy of playing as I would for the base game with my standard actions, and gaining energy through special actions where I needed it. This elicited cries of mirth from my playing partners who thought trying to apply strategy with all the extra complexity going on at the start was madness. In a way, though, it allowed me to make progress whilst beginning to learn the intricacies of the additions, allowing me to merge the energy-gathering and base game growth as the game progressed. For those struggling to get to grips with the game, I would definitely advise this as a good way to pick up the expansion.

In conclusion

In general, as with all of Uwe’s games that I’ve played (Agricola, Le Havre, Loyang) the rules are very clear. The additions complement the game so well that although they introduce a lot of new complexity in terms of decision making, the changes to player actions are limited. There were a couple of points where clarification would have been useful, such as in the case of the Tenant Farmer, where we were unsure as to whether or not horses should be included. The rules could also maybe have benefitted with more detailed card descriptions a’la the original. Overall though, the majority of our queries were mentioned somewhere in the rules.

To sum up, Farmers of the Moor is an excellent expansion. It adds a new level of complexity, some excellent minor improvements, and the horseeples are great. The additional player interaction introduced with the special actions provides a new layer of brain-melting decision making, which will hopefully keep anyone who found the base game too simple amused! When compared to Factory Manager, €25 for an expansion vs a whole game seems quite steep, but considering the number of cards, the quality of the artwork and the seamless integration, it’s definitely worth it. I will be playing this one more; I fully expect it to be a de-facto part of my Agricola games from now on.

Rating

Agricola: Farmers of the Moor9.5102