I finally got a chance to try out the
Famrers of the Moor expansion for Agricola this weekend. My game group had been eyeing it nervously for the past couple of weeks, as we weren't entirely sure that we wanted to add even more difficulty to the game of Farming and Pain. Eventually, four of us decided to face up to the challenge, if only for the chance to play around with the horse meeples.
Farmers of the Moor adds a lot to Agricola and has several suggestions for how to use the expansion, ranging from modified versions of the family game to just shoving everything in and playing the full game. We opted for the latter, had fun punching out counters and trying to find space for everything on the table, and jumped right in. Here's a brief overview of the new additions:
First off, your farmland now contains squares filled with woods and peat bogs that need to be cleared before they can be used. You draw a card to determine the arrangement of these tiles, though it's always five wood and three peat. These spaces are considered to be used for purposes of figuring out your final score, so you don't necessarily have to clear all of them. by the end of the game.
However, you'll probably want to get them out of your way by virtue of the new action card mechanic. There are several cards included that allow you to turn peat into fuel tokens and to turn wood spaces into either two wood or into a plowed field. You take these cards as non-token actions during the regular turn - if the card is available, you can just pick it as your action without having to use one of your farmers. The trade off is that play continues from there and you have to wait until it comes around to you again before you can place a player token. So, you'll have to decide which is more important: clearing that pesky woods space in the middle of your field or grabbing that pile of wood that's been building up for the past two turns before the person next to you gets it first. If someone grabs the card you needed and you absolutely must have it, for two food you can also choose to take that card. Once two people have taken an action during a round, it's flipped over and won't be available until the next round. Finally, you can only choose these non-token actions while you still have a regular farmer action left to take.
As mentioned, you'll be taking these actions to clear space on your farm and to gain fuel. The fuel mechanic requires you to have one fuel unit (either a wood token or a fuel token) for each room of your house. Clay and stone houses are more efficient and there are improvements you can get that will reduce the amount of fuel you need. If you don't have enough fuel, your farmers have to spend an action in the infirmary before they're able to work again.
The cards have other actions available as well, such as a black market that allows you to spend fuel units to have the chance to play minor or major improvements without having to spend a farmer token to do so, or to gain horses. Horses (included as cute meeples rather than plain cubes) are very straightforward: at the end of the game each horse is worth one point, with no limit on the number of points you can have from horses. Yes, that is as powerful as you think it is.
In order to put all this new stuff to use there are a slew of new minor improvements included, as well as 14 new major improvements. Most of the major improvements are placed underneath the ones already included in the game, so you aren't able to get to them until the standard improvements are purchased. To be honest, we were so overwhelmed by the other new mechanics that most of the players didn't really get around to exploiting the new major improvements. That said, the player who did take advantage of them won the game, so I suppose I'll be looking at them a lot more closely in my next game.
And there you have it. Once we got the hang of the new mechanics, we were able to get up to speed very quickly. That said, the expansion does make the game go slower, as folks are taking up turn time choosing (and agonizing over whether or not to choose) the non-token card actions. When it was over (yours truly coming in third, though with a fairly respectable score), we were all reasonably pleased with the expansion, but perhaps a bit dubious as to how much it really added to the game. Sure, there are plenty of new mechanics and cards to liven things up for the hardcore Agricola player who's gotten tired of the base set, but I was mostly reminded of the Cities and Knights expansion for Settlers of Catan: the main thing I felt that Farmers of the Moor really added to the game was about an hour. Having more mechanics to play with was interesting, but I'm not sure I prefer it over plain old Agricola, especially considering the extra time it took us to play. I'll report back after I've had another go at it. Even if I'm not sure that I really want to do battle with the fuel mechanic on top of everything else Agricola already throws at you, it may be that I just can't resist the urge to fill my pastures with horse meeples.
FnordChan