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What We're Playing

Agricola

Designed By: Uwe Rosenberg

Published By: Lookout Games 999 Games Z-Man Games

Agricola was a big hit in 2008, surprising perhaps for a game that places each player as a farming couple somewhere in Central Europe in the Middle Ages.  This may not seem relevant to your current organisational dilemmas but there’s plenty going on that can help people to think about how they best manage under tough circumstances.

To win the game you’ll need to take a balanced approach, you’ll need to grow your workforce, but not so quickly that you can’t feed them, you’ll need to improve your premises, but not at the expense of making improvements to your farm.  You’ll need to keep a balanced portfolio, it may be easy to keep cooking your sheep to feed everyone, but to win the game you’ll need to demonstrate that you can keep a range of livestock along with enough arable crops to insure against disaster.

Once you get to grips with the basic game you can add improvements and occupations.  It’ll cost you food to develop your skills but if you have a master brewer on the team you’ll have satisfied workers making beer from grain, and giving your fisherman a canoe will increase your food supply as well as providing extra reed for your basket weaving operation.

There’s plenty to think about as you work hard to improve your lot whilst ensuring everyone gets paid and you have sufficient diversity in your business to guard against any disasters, then you can start to worry about ensuring that you limit the resources and opportunities available to your competitors to give yourself the maximum advantage.  There’s no turkey farming option, but Agricola makes for an interesting family game that works on a number of levels.

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Claudine McClean
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