Flashback Friday - Agricola & Interview with Hanno

1) Who are you, what do you do and what...

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I actually *like* worker placement games and I don’t play Agricola anymore. For all it’s variability with the cards you get, it’s still really scripted. You have to plan to grow your family and do so as soon as you can. In all my many plays of the game, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who doesn’t do that win. Also, the “You have to do everything and you’re punished for not doing something” angle of the game has wore out its welcome for me.

For worker placement I will play Champions of Midgard (with expansions), Raiders of the North Sea, or Tzolk’in, all of which are top tier for the genre.

I sincerely hope to never, ever play the board game again.

HOWEVER, I still play the iOS app a lot, especially the single-player mode. It's a great way to play, because it turns the game from a boring board game into a fun, thinky puzzle. Over the course of successive rounds, you have to surpass an increasingly higher score, in order to advance to the next round. And it even has a bit of a "level up" flavor, in that you're allowed to keep one Occupation card from each round. So by the sixth round, you've got five Occupation cards in play at the start ... but, you have to score, like, 75 points or whatever. I like it a lot. This is pretty much the only way I'll play Agricola anymore.

Without timestamps, I'm having difficulties knowing what's a timewarp admin post or if an old poster created a new article from old content.

I unashamedly love Agricola and my only complaint is that you’re forced to be a jack of all trades instead of specializing. Granted, I don’t think the game would work well if you could just build a sheep engine and pump them out indefinitely, but the final scoring seems oppressive.

If I had time, I’d like to create a MDK deck which includes pesticide, poison, and fire cards which you can build to respectively kill fields, kill animals, and burn buildings to the ground. That would make the game so much more fun for me.

Awesome! Whatever happened to Skeletor?

He's still very active on BGG. You can find him in the various forums for massive plastic Kickstarter games.

Jexik wrote: Awesome! Whatever happened to Skeletor?

He rage-quit F:AT many years ago. I can't remember why. I believe there have been occasional sightings of him in specific game discussion threads at BGG since then.

ubarose wrote: I actually had no interest in ever playing Agricola, until I read this interview. I figured, if the publisher has that sense of humor, the game can't be all bad. The interview still, literally makes me laugh out loud when I read it. Also, Hanno sent me the X-deck, to make the game more Ameritrashy.

I swear everyone who wanted me to try Agricola described it as "well, it's a pretty dry, somewhat boring Euro that I really like." Wow, don't oversell it TOO much.

charlest wrote: You can find him in the various forums for massive plastic Kickstarter games.

HAHA. Well that explains why I haven't seen him.

ubarose wrote: I guess it depend upon how you look at it. Mr. Skeletor argues that it is a game about f**king.

I call this the Stone Age fallacy. superfly has to play Agricola now.

Played it twice. Hated it both times and spent half the game just wishing it would end.

I've no problem with worker placement. I love Dominant Species.

I still love Agricola. It's among my favorites. I am an unabashed Uwe fangirl.