Farming. When I hear the word, I imagine early mornings, and late nights. I imagine hours riding giant machines, going back and forth down a seemingly endless supply of carefully laid paths of dirt. I imagine the late summer fields of corn waving in the breeze. I imagine it being tough work, but kind of boring.
When it comes to farming in games, it's about the same. I can only think of a handful of farming games off the top of my head, the main one being Agricola. Agricola is one of the top games on Board Game Geek, but in all honesty, while I enjoy an occasional game... I find it tough work to do well, and I end up being a little bored by the end of the game.
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| Designer Grant Rodiek, laying the smack down on me |
In Farmageddon, players will be battling over a limited amount of farmland, with a goal of having the most money in your harvest pile by the end of the game. Of course, it isn't going to be easy. Your opponents are armed with a litany of action cards, many of which are going to do some bad things to your crops. If you are lucky enough to have a crop survive an entire cycle of the table, and it is fully fertilized, then you can place it safely into your score pile.
The basics of the game are, well, basic. Each player starts the game with two crop cards and three action cards in their hand. The three Planting Field cards are placed in the center of the table, and you're ready to play. On a turn, a player starts by drawing two crop cards. The player can then do a number of things in a turn:
Plant Crops - Take a crop card from your hand and play it on an open Planting Field.
Fertilize Crops - Take a crop card from your hand, flip it face down, and place it on a planted crop.
Play Action Cards - This action is only allowed to be done twice per turn. Action cards can be played on any legitimate target.
Harvest Crops - If a crop is fully fertilized, and it is not the turn it came into play, then you take the crop card (and any monetary bonus or penalty cards on it) and place them into your harvest pile! Hooray points!
A player can do all of those (save for playing action cards) as many times as they can and/or want to in a turn, they then draw two action cards, and pray their crops don't get destroyed or stolen in the next couple minutes.
The game goes until the last crop card is drawn, at which point each player except the one that drew the cards gets one last turn. Most money in the harvest pile wins!
There are a couple things I've found refreshing about Farmageddon, in the sea of "take that" card games it is bravely sailing into. The most obvious thing I love is the art. Farmageddon has some of the best drawn card art I've come across in a while. I love the cartoonish crop animations. Major props to Brett Bean.
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| Some of that great card art. |
I also greatly appreciate that there are several different strategies to success you can follow towards victory. One of my hangups in most "take that" style games is that there's only one way to play and win the game. Here, there are some different paths to victory, though admittedly there's still a lot of randomness and luck involved. You can try to be the big cash crop guy; playing nothing but Wary Squash and Grumpy Melons, and trying to keep them alive by defensively using Foul Manure cards. There's a rather fun "Chaos" strategy I've seen pop up which involves trying to horde all the fields the entire game, and focus all actions on stealing / destroying other's crops. My favorite strategy is to play Captain Quiet: humbly planting smaller crops like Sassy Wheat, and sitting idly by watching the chaos around me. I then strike out late in the game (with a metric ton of cards in my hand), stealing as much as I can, and scoring other people's crops.
Farmageddon is a fun, fast-paced farming themed game. There's a sentence I never thought I would type. Even if my friends do things like this...
It may be hard to see, but that's a Pesticides card, worth -$5, played on my Stinky Truffle, worth $3. My friends are not nice people.
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