Tabletop games
Agricola
Develop your farm and feed your family, knowing that every shortfall costs points.
- players
- 1–5
- minutes
- 100
You’ll need the game box. Marquoir sums up the rules and keeps score.
Setup
- Each player gets a farm with a two-room wooden house and two family members.
- A new action is added to the central board each round.
How to play
- On your turn, place a family member on a free action space, which is then blocked.
- Plough, take wood, build a stable, extend your house, have a child.
- At the end of certain rounds comes the harvest: every family member must be fed.
Scoring
- Each missing category costs -1: grain, vegetables, sheep, wild boar, cattle. Beyond that, each category scores according to a sliding scale printed on the score sheet.
- Each unused farmyard space costs -1 point.
- Each begging card, received for lack of food, costs -3 points.
- Clay or stone rooms, stables, family members and improvements score points.
End of the game
- The game ends after the fourteenth round.
House rules and pitfalls
- Failing to feed your family is the costliest mistake: three points per mouth, at every harvest.
Frequently asked questions
What happens if you cannot feed your family?
At each harvest, you need 2 food per family member. Whatever is missing is paid in Begging tokens, worth -3 points each at the end of the game: famine kills nobody, but it is expensive.
How do you grow your family?
By taking the "Family growth" action, if you have room (a free room in your house). Each new member gives you one more action in the following rounds — but also one more mouth to feed.
Why are some actions blocked?
Each action space holds only one worker per round. The first to take it closes it to the others: the game is a race for the key spaces, food and wood above all.
What are Occupation and Improvement cards for?
They are played through dedicated actions and give lasting powers (discounts, resources, points). Chaining them well is the heart of the strategy; without them, you quickly hit a ceiling.
How are points counted at the end?
Each type of crop, animal and building scores according to a scale, and above all you LOSE points for each category where you have zero (an empty field, no sheep…). Diversity is rewarded, gaps are punished.
The box
- Released
- 2007
- Age
- Ages 12+
- Designer
- Uwe Rosenberg
- Artwork
- Klemens Franz
- Publisher
- Filosofia Éditions
- Mechanics
- Ressources qui poussentDraftEncerclementRessources délaissées qui grossissentJouable en solo
- Expansions
- Agricola: Les Fermiers de la Lande · 2010
- Agricola: Extension Belgique · 2012
Rules on video
Videos in French, hosted on YouTube.
Where to find it
Specialist French shops. Marquoir earns nothing from these links.