Not Your Parents' Board Games
By David Means
Agricola
Agricola is a “worker placement” game. As a player you’re a Renaissance-era farmer in a wooden shack with your spouse and little else.
On each turn you get to take only two actions, one for you and one for the spouse, from all the possibilities you’ll find on a farm: collecting clay, wood, or stone; building fences; and so on. You might think about having kids in order to get more work accomplished, but first you need to expand your house. And what are you going to feed all the little rugrats?
Players need to do some of everything on their farm (plowing fields, growing vegetables, raising sheep, pigs, and cattle, building fences, adding on to the house, upgrading the home, building stables, etc.) as opposed to specializing in one or two things, because the final scoring rewards diversity.
The game supports many levels of complexity, mainly through the use (or non-use) of two of its main types of cards, Minor Improvements and Occupations. In the beginner’s version (also called the Family Variant), these cards are not used at all. For advanced play, the game includes three levels of both types of cards; Basic (E-deck), Interactive (I-deck), and Complex (K-deck), and the rulebook encourages players to experiment with the various decks and mixtures thereof. Aftermarket decks such as the Z-Deck and the L-Deck also exist.
Rukshuk
Rukshuk is a dexterity game. Players race against the clock to build different Rukshuk rock formations and score as many points as they can.
Each player selects seven game rocks (actually poly-stone shapes) from the pouch. Game rocks are worth different points based on their ‘stack-ability.’ Players score regular and bonus points by using the rocks to build all or part of the Rukshuk formation shown on the game card in sixty seconds or less.
If a player’s Rukshuk formation topples before time expires, he must quickly rebuild it. When time runs out, players tally the points from their formations. Once scores are counted the players select new rocks, turn over the next card and build a new Rukshuk.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND SERIES: In January 2016, KaCSFFS member (Director, as of April, 2017) and notable board game collector David Means gave a presentation to the club about his collection. It was so interesting, I asked for permission to reprint it as a series of posts on this blog. He graciously agreed, and supplied me with his script. I have divided it into several posts and added the illustrations, hyperlinks, embedded videos, etc. as seemed appropriate. --Jan S. Gephardt, Communications Officer
IMAGES: Many thanks to Wikipedia for the photos of the Agricola game box, and also the image of the game being set up. I also want to thank Cision PR Web for the photo of the Rukshuk Game contents, and Saratreetravels, a travel blog, for the photo of Sara and her friend Simone, playing around with Simone's Rukshuk game.
By David Means
Agricola is a “worker placement” game. As a player you’re a Renaissance-era farmer in a wooden shack with your spouse and little else.
On each turn you get to take only two actions, one for you and one for the spouse, from all the possibilities you’ll find on a farm: collecting clay, wood, or stone; building fences; and so on. You might think about having kids in order to get more work accomplished, but first you need to expand your house. And what are you going to feed all the little rugrats?
Players need to do some of everything on their farm (plowing fields, growing vegetables, raising sheep, pigs, and cattle, building fences, adding on to the house, upgrading the home, building stables, etc.) as opposed to specializing in one or two things, because the final scoring rewards diversity.
The game supports many levels of complexity, mainly through the use (or non-use) of two of its main types of cards, Minor Improvements and Occupations. In the beginner’s version (also called the Family Variant), these cards are not used at all. For advanced play, the game includes three levels of both types of cards; Basic (E-deck), Interactive (I-deck), and Complex (K-deck), and the rulebook encourages players to experiment with the various decks and mixtures thereof. Aftermarket decks such as the Z-Deck and the L-Deck also exist.
Rukshuk is a dexterity game. Players race against the clock to build different Rukshuk rock formations and score as many points as they can.
Each player selects seven game rocks (actually poly-stone shapes) from the pouch. Game rocks are worth different points based on their ‘stack-ability.’ Players score regular and bonus points by using the rocks to build all or part of the Rukshuk formation shown on the game card in sixty seconds or less.
If a player’s Rukshuk formation topples before time expires, he must quickly rebuild it. When time runs out, players tally the points from their formations. Once scores are counted the players select new rocks, turn over the next card and build a new Rukshuk.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND SERIES: In January 2016, KaCSFFS member (Director, as of April, 2017) and notable board game collector David Means gave a presentation to the club about his collection. It was so interesting, I asked for permission to reprint it as a series of posts on this blog. He graciously agreed, and supplied me with his script. I have divided it into several posts and added the illustrations, hyperlinks, embedded videos, etc. as seemed appropriate. --Jan S. Gephardt, Communications Officer
IMAGES: Many thanks to Wikipedia for the photos of the Agricola game box, and also the image of the game being set up. I also want to thank Cision PR Web for the photo of the Rukshuk Game contents, and Saratreetravels, a travel blog, for the photo of Sara and her friend Simone, playing around with Simone's Rukshuk game.
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