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Bohnanza (1997)
Growing up as a kid, I wanted to be a bean farmer. Well, my first preference was to dig up dinosaurs, followed by becoming an astronaut, then firefighter. But after all that, I just really wanted to be a bean farmer. If you’ve never met a bean farmer; there’s a very good reason for it. They keep it a secret because of all the money they make and the women they get. It’s that glamorous. So when I had an opportunity to play Bohnanza recently as well as teach it to a group, you can bet I was excited.
In Bohnanza, you and one to six other people enter the lucrative world of bean-farming. The objective of the game is to make more money than everyone else after you’ve run through the deck a certain number of times. In front of you are two invisible bean fields that you can use. Why do you only have two fields? I don’t know, maybe you’re a really crappy bean farmer, or it’s the start of your career. If so, this would be the equivalent that making Youtube videos of you singing is the start of a music career. Will you be successful? Who knows. Luckily for you, everyone you’re playing with is an equally-terrible bean farmer.
In your hand there will be cards with pictures of beans on them. You plant and harvest these beans to make money. For some reason these beans are anthropomorphised, which to the layman means they have faces on them. They’re also doing stuff in the pictures, like farming (whoa dude, meta), engaging in fisticuffs (okay..), puking their guts out (haha) or smashing out a million-dollar deal on Wall St (seriously). In any case, it’s supposed to make the game cute but it just makes me feel bad when I turn harvest these living, breathing beans with personalities to turn them into sweet, sweet currency. But enough about beanocide, let’s get to the game itself.
These are some pretty wacky beans. Hungarian version pictured
One of the unique aspects of Bohnanza, and the one that people always say “really?!” to when you explain it to them, is that your hand order never changes. The order you draw cards is the order that they stay in your hand, no exceptions. Each field you have can only support one type of bean at a time. In addition to this, on your turn you are forced to plant the first bean at the front of your hand, no matter what it is (you can also plant the second card in your hand if you like). What if your fields are full of soy beans and green beans but the game is telling you that you have to plant that red bean right now? You have to harvest that bean field right now to make room for it. You might even make no money for the merciless slaughter of 2 blue beans that are just trying to have a peaceful Wild-West shootout (yep). Suddenly, bean-farming doesn’t feel like a rock star profession at all. How do you prevent this type of nonsense from happening?
Well, if you’re my friend Adam (name changed), you take the card you don’t want to plant and you hide it under the table. In reality (meaning this virtual world of bean-farming), you’re supposed to trade the card away before it gets to your turn. There are approximately 80 different chances to do this during a game, Adam, because after you’ve finished planting their beans on their turn, you reveal the top two cards of the bean deck and an open trading phase begins. Let’s say you turn up from the deck a red you don’t want and you need blue beans (because the other player seems to be planting red beans so it’s in their interest), you can offer a trade for it (and throw in a couple of red beans from your hand too to sweeten the deal). If he accepts, BAM! You right away plant your new blue bean and increase your harvest and it’s not even your turn. How sweet is that? You’re the best damn bean farmer in the whole world.
So once you’ve (hopefully) traded away the two open-market cards (and offloaded some other rubbish cards from your hand), you plant your new acquisitions and then draw three new cards and put them at the back of your hand.
Of course, your opponent plants the red beans you gave him too, but you didn’t realise that red beans are actually worth more in the game when harvesting, did you? So foolish! This is where the wheeling and dealing comes in. Beans are worth more than others upon harvesting depending on how many of them are in the field. These details are all written on the card, along with how many of that bean type are in the deck. That means if someone else is trying to muscle in on your red bean territory you will either need to A) quit and go back to your crappy, low-paying job performing brain surgery at the hospital, B) find a way to convince other players to give you their red beans instead of the person, who may or may not be a bedwetter, sitting opposite you, or C) steal their bean cards when they go to the toilet and then blame Adam. Everyone thinks he’s a shady character anyway.
And so forth. When you harvest beans you get gold, which does not come in the form of nice little plastic gold pieces but instead involves turning over some of the bean cards you’re harvesting to show the gold piece side instead of the bean side. This is probably a clever production-cost-reduction-thing technique, but I think it’s something done by the original developers to make it easier to cheat for balance since it means not all of your bean cards go into the discard pile (awaiting the next shuffle) when you harvest them. For example, if you somehow by sheer luck, stupid opponents or someone who doesn’t bother to shuffle the desk when they first bring it out (this is usually the one), create a field of 4 Cocoa Beans and harvest it for 4 gold, you’ll likely never see those beans appear again in the desk unless you spend some of that money later. But why would you do that?
The objective of the game is to have the most money at the end, which is fair enough. Luckily you can spend money too! While rock stars might spend their money on booze, private jets and guitars made of frozen wine, you have all the luxuriances of bean farming available to you. Meaning the only thing you can buy is a third bean field thus elevating your status from “unknown Youtube bean farmer” to “Wikipedia page-having [that you didn't create yourself] bean farmer”.
The game is distilled trading down to its basics, and I think it’s an excellent game. It’s pure, not fluffed up with pretty coinage or additional mechanics, and it’s ridiculously simple to play. As someone who doesn’t enjoy trading games that much (because there’s usually some jerk with an Super Economics degree who beats you all at Power Grid consistently), I think Bohnanza is a lot of fun. You’re never really sure who’s going to win a given game (this may not be a good thing), but it’s a good time for friends to sit around, extort one another and demand that they hand over all the Stink Beans in their hand or else you’ll tell everyone why they were really at the doctor last week.
As a final point regarding the theme, it’s fun, basic and not necessary to enjoy the game. Planting and harvesting a field of beans is as simple as putting down or picking up cards. Buying a bean field involves throwing a few cards into a box. This really did not meet my desires of bean farmer dreams as mentioned at the beginning. I felt like less of a bean farmer and more like a bean farmer’s accountant, or a mogul who sits in their million-dollar mansion, surrounded by bean fields and slaves screaming “PLANT MORE CHILLI BEANS”. I wanted to be a real, getting-his-hands-dirty bean farmer. I wanted thirst, hunger and back cramp mechanics during planting and harvesting that necessitated half a dozen dice rolls. I wanted you to have to go to a market and try to sell your single crappy chilli bean because Adam wouldn’t accept your donation of a blue bean despite having a corner on the blue bean market and he really could have used them but no, he wanted to make you plant it and everyone else thought it was so funny. I hate you, Adam.
But I love being a bean farmer.
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