-
This is a weird idea I had for playing Agricola. Instead of having normal family members, every round you can place between 2 and 6 family members -- however, over the course of the entire game, you are limited to (let's say) 40 actions. 28 are spoken for already (2 each for 14 rounds), leaving you 12 "spare" actions which you can play on any round. But once they're gone, they're gone. If you use them up too early, then your opponents will get better uncontested actions later on, but if you wait too late then you may find the board too blocked up for you to get all your points.
Of course, this needs some tweaking to make sense. For example, normally you grow your house to get more family members; in this variant the house would need some other purpose. The simplest solution would be to just make rooms worth more points. Harvests should probably have fixed food requirements, e.g. 4 food for the first harvest, 5 for the second, 6 for the third, etc. As for what to do with the Family Growth actions, I really don't know.
Obviously I haven't actually tried playing this way; anyone think it could possibly be worthwhile?
-
Geoff Burkman
United States
Kettering
Ohio
"Punk is not dead" by daughter, Emily
-
Hmmm. Worthwhile? Hard to say. The early Rounds could get heavily skewed if one or more players decides to go for excess actions gathering goods or food. Also, you lose the whole dynamic of having to expand your hut in order to grow your family. As for feeding, perhaps make it a function of how many actions a player takes during the Stage (drawback: bookkeeping).
I dunno, I'm not feeling the love on this one, d.
-
Tibs
United States
Baltimore
Maryland
-
No. This eliminates much of the incentive for picking family growth. The whole idea is that more people means more actions at the cost of feeding them. Here you don't get those extra actions; only the points at game end.
-
James Klemm
United States
Walnut Creek
California
-
I think it would be fun.
-
Benjamin Wells
United Kingdom
Bradford
W Yorkshire
-
When I first read it I was similarly intrigued but sceptical as it would change the growth dynamic entirely. But it's worth a try and session report. It is a nice idea for evening out the scramble for rooms and growth and the play lots early or late game is interesting.
I feel that it might make it a little more dry and edge the game closer to the realm of chess? There is something about the slightly unfair nature of Agricola that stops us weaker players becoming discouraged.
-
Rory Kurek
United States
Minneapolis
Minnesota
-
It is an interesting idea, but I can't see it working. My hunch is that because of the whole "snowball effect" that games like Agricola have, actions on earlier turns are essentially worth more than actions on later turns. Because of this, it's in a player's best interests to take as many actions as he/she can as early as possible and simply reap the rewards. Granted, having everyone jockeying for positions on the board might mitigate this somewhat, but I still think the pacing of the game would probably be thrown off, like Benjamin said.
Who knows, though, its probably still worth a try. More variant ideas can only be a good thing. 
-
Chris F.
United States
Atlanta
Georgia
-
It seems this variant would make it difficult to maneuver for the standard SP bonus - if your opponent takes SP and there is 3w, you would always have an extra action to snipe it. I suppose this could add to the game of figuring out when sniping is most important.
One possible correction (a further twist): Before each round, each player secretly decides the number of extra actions they will take for that round. I imagine the players could reveal their total number of actions for that round either right at the beginning of the round, or only as needed (one at a time, as each new action is played. Watch in horror as your opponents clean up the board! All players' remaining extra actions would be visible - as the game progresses, players can see that someone is saving up for a big late-game round.
As with most variants, I feel like I don't play the plain game enough as it is. I would, however, like to read a session report where skilled farmers take this for a spin.
That said, a friend and I have a game planned where we will shuffle all 14 round cards together and go from there. If that ends quickly enough, we might give this one a try.
-
|
|
Posted Sun Jan 29, 2012 4:18 am
