Agricola Six-Player Variant: The Genius of Three Contributors

Unlike many of the entries I've written for this blog, this post does not relate to first-hand nostalgia (1HN) or anything from my past. Instead, I am writing about Agricola, the superlative game created by Uwe Rosenborg. It burst on the Euro boardgame scene in 2007 and has garnered numerous awards, namely the 2008 Complex Game Spiel des Jahres, which is the German Game of the Year award -- the Academy Award of board games. It's a game that involves placing workers on action spaces to plow fields, build fences and pastures, grow crops, raise livestock, expand a family, and improve the farm to score points. All the while, players have to worry about feeding their families during each harvest, which is nerve-wracking, and developing their farms in a diverse and balanced fashion, since diversity is emphasized as people who score in the most categories often do well. I'm not doing justice to Agricola, but there are numerous reviews out there that strive to explain this game. Of course, if you are too busy to read those reviews, I can sum up Agricola with one sentence: it's a wonderful mental exercise that causes headaches and is certainly worth your and your family's time.

That said, in this post, I am consolidating the contributions of three different Board Game Geek members who have produced resources that make it possible to play Agricola as a six-player game. Out of the box, Agricola allows one to five players to play, which is really cool because you can play solo if you have no one around or you can play with four other family members or friends in a game that truly absorbs over two hours of play time. However, thanks to the genius of Agricola fans, you can play with a sixth player. To do so, here are the steps I took to play six-player Agricola:

1) Go to the Lookout Games website and order items

Lookout Games is the German manufacturer of Agricola and the brainchild of Uwe Rosenborg and others. At that site, you can order most of their products with English text or language-independent products, such as game pieces. When you go to the website, navigate to the Shop webpage and click Agricola to narrow the results to display Agricola items only. Surprisingly, it was at this website that I ordered the following items at the best prices I could find online:

• One set of Resource pieces
• One set of Grain and Vegetable pieces (if available)
• An extra player board
• Pieces for a sixth player

Including shipping, all of these items (at the Euro exchange rate at which I bought these items) cost me about $27 (US). As of May 2, 2014, all but the Grain and Vegetable pieces are available, but you can find these pieces under another category on the website if you search for them. I highly recommend you buy extra resource, grain, and vegetable pieces because six players will gobble up the pieces that come with the game rather quickly.

By the way, the Lookout Games website is in German, but German is translated into English easily by most browsers.

2) Register for membership at Boardgamegeek.com

To download the items that I mention in the following steps, please register for a free membership to Board Game Geek. Once you have your membership, not only can you download anything at any available file size, but you can also comment on people's reviews and even write board game reviews of your own.

3) Print out stickers for multiplier pieces and paste them to your default discs

A Board Game Geek member named ScottE created stickers that act as multipliers. For example, instead of having three wood tokens to signify three wood, you could take one 3x wood piece. What I did was after I received my extra pieces from Lookout Games, I printed out this user's multipier stickers, cut them out, pasted together two of the discs that represent wood in the Agricola box, and then pasted the cut sticker to the top of the stacked disc. Now, I have a 3x wood multipler token that saves the nicely-card wood pieces for those who have smaller amounts of wood.

To make the stickers fit on top of the default wood discs, I printed both pages of ScottE's PDF onto one 8.5 x 11 in. piece of paper. As it turned out, each sticker was sized perfectly to fit on the default discs out of the Agricola box. Moreover, when I played six-player Agricola, I found that having these  multiplier tokens were extremely useful and helped my friends and I not run out of any resource pieces during gameplay.

4) Download the Six-Player Variant board

A Board Game Geek member named patox created a six-player variant board that looks very much like the boards that come with Agricola. If you are a member of Board Game Geek, you can download the largest version of the six-player board file. I downloaded it and played a six-player game recently with it. Though I am relatively inexperienced with the game, I was more than impressed with how the board addressed player needs without making the game easier. My only observation is that there are only two Build Fences action available to six players: one is on the main actions board, and the other one is part of the Renovate action that comes out during the last round of the game. The six-player board does not provide another action space for building fences, so gameplay can be very challenging for those who want to use farmyard spaces at the end of the game and not get penalized for unused spaces (which is a -1 point penalty for each unused farmyard space).

In any case, this board is absolutely awesome, but keep in mind that you'll have to print out the board on 8.5 x 14 in. paper and then paste it on large, thick cardstock.

5) Download the Major Improvement card image

A third Board Game Geek member named Tinkerer created images to lay over three Minor Improvement cards that are used as Major Improvements on the Six-Player Variant board. Understandably, the three Minor Improvement cards (Simple Fireplace, Cooking Hearth, and Wood-Fired Oven) do not have the burgundy border that denotes Major Improvements. However, if you print out the image to which I linked and size the image to a height of 3.63 inches, you can then cut out each card and slide them as overlays over the Minor Improvement cards in card sleeves. You now have three new Major Improvement cards that work with the Six-Player Variant board and look pretty close to how these cards would look if Lookout Games had manufactured them.

6) Get five friends together to play.

As it turned out, not only did I get six co-worker friends to play, but I had to teach all of them how to play the game! Also, since I was the seventh person, I decided to sit out the game and help my friends learn Agricola... with the Six-Player Variant board. After three lunch breaks of play, each of my friends walked away from the game stating that they liked the game and felt that, for a fan-created board, the Six-Player Variant board was well-crafted and effective. As for me, I was very pleased that, with some well-placed orders, some Internet hunting, and some cutting and pasting, I could make Agricola playable for six players and not have the game feel ruined.

To Lookout Games, patox, ScottE, and Tinkerer, thank you for making six-player Agricola a reality. Also, to those of you who have yet to play Agricola, just know that if you're ever interested in learning the game, there are fine fan-made resources out there that can enhance your gaming experience without depriving you of too much money.

Baseball: 1HN Normalizer

For much of my elementary schools years and the first of my junior high school years, I often felt like an outsider, different from most kids. I don't think it was my affinity for Dungeons & Dragons or for video games that set me apart, or my taste in music (Def Leppard!), or my love of school and learning. Deeper than those things, I didn't talk or act like "normal" kids, whatever "normal" means. Maybe it was my vocabulary or maybe it was my eccentric interests after all... I couldn't put my finger on it. I'm sure some of you can relate, but there was always that notion that would emerge from deep within my psyche whenever I was around people: "Why don't I fit in?"

Interestingly, this seemed to change sometime in eighth grade: I started collecting baseball cards. At first, it was something to do with my cousin Mark, who was a collector himself; we would go to Price Club (now Costco) and buy a box of Topps cards... 1987 Topps cards, to be exact. I remember opening the packs with a petrified stick of pink that left an oily residue on the unfortunate piece of cardboard that happened to be placed next to it. I often ignored the gum. I would then organize the cards by teams and look at the Team Leaders card -- the one that listed the home run, RBI, and batting average leaders of each team on it. Then, I would trade for those players with my cousin. At the time, I didn't really think I was swindling him, but I was. Around that time, my interest in baseball cards caught the interest of my friend Ed, who was himself becoming a collector. We used to trade with each other, go to baseball card conventions, and laugh about the Walt Terrell rookie card that we almost acquired (I don't know why, but it was funny at the time to want to labor so hard to buy the rookie card of an OK player).

Inevitably, collecting baseball cards led to an interest in watching baseball, which led to a more profound interest in playing baseball. Throughout my eighth-grade year, I played baseball almost every day in the street in front of my house with two kids much younger than I was, a tennis ball, and a street reflector serving as home plate. We used to practice switch-hitting; to this day, I still marvel at the fact that I was able to hit the ball over a distant lightpole left-handed. Sure, it was against an 11-year-old pitcher, but it was still awesome to a 14-year-old.

Honing my skills on the mean streets of my hometown compelled me to try my hand at organizing baseball; Little League, that is, or at least "little" for 15-year-olds. I played one season of baseball with the A's and played first base, second base, third base, and all three outfield positions during that season. I was a decent hitter (I hit over .300, I think), I could steal bases (which was a surprise because before ninth grade I was officially slow), and I had a cannon for an arm, but I was also hot-headed and hated to make mistakes. Nobody was harder on me than me, and that was my greatest obstacle in baseball: I had a hard time overcoming my own mistakes. Sadly, though that baseball season wasn't a bad one and my team placed second in its league, the luster of the game was lost on me because I was not happy with myself. I'll come back to this point later.

After that baseball season, I turned my back on baseball. In high school, I ran cross country and swam on the swim team. In college, my favorite sport was basketball, mostly because I was good at fighting for rebounds and I could always make up for a mistake on one end of the floor with a key play at the other end of the floor. I did play intramural softball, though, and I even felt the buzz of baseball enough to play a few practice sessions a couple of co-workers at a local park. Besides lofting pitches over the Little League fence of that field at which we played, I still remember making a nice diving catch of a line drive over second base, which earned the applause of my buddies. I know it was just practice, but it felt good to know that I could pull out a spectacular play once in a while. After college, I rarely, if ever, played softball or baseball. Basketball, and then running, became my favorite sports and I enjoyed playing them.

However, recently, I've been watching (for the third time) Ken Burns' superlative documentary series, Baseball, which was originally released in 1994. As I watch that series, I am not only reminded of how much I liked baseball and how fascinating the figures of yore are, but I also remember the greatest impact baseball had on me: it normalized me in so many ways. First, I have come to realize that that some skill in a sport can earn the respect of other boys and men much more than intellectual or social talent can do. As a socially-awkward seventh-grader, I had few friends, and the friends that I did have were just as fringe as I was. Yet, as I made it to ninth-grade, I began to earn the respect of other boys because I could play baseball. In fact, one of my Little League teammates once vouch for my skills in front of some popular boys; of course, those popular guys didn't heed his endorsements, but I could certainly hit as far as, if not farther than, they could hit. Secondly, I had something "normal" to discuss with other boys; it was definitely more accepted to talk about Kirk Gibson's dramatic home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series than it was to talk about Armor Class or saving throws (D&D references here). However, beyond the physical skill and the ability to discuss a "normal" subject, baseball not only gave me access to guys who were not so academically-inclined, but it made me more accessible. To this day, I can talk baseball with some of my running friends and I actually have something to discuss; without baseball (or sports knowledge, in general), many guys (Americans, at least) are inaccessible. By this, I contend that the most noteworthy power of sports is that it allows us to reach others, hopefully with the hope of Christ and as an encourager.

There is one more aspect of myself that baseball normalized: the epiphany that mistakes are a part of the game and of life. As a ninth-grader on a Little League team, my love of baseball was diminished because of my inability to recover emotionally from my own mistakes. For much of my life, I had trouble overcoming the fact that I had deficiencies and that I would lose games. That was why I often avoided playing board games, video games, or even sports against people; I didn't like losing. Sadly, it took years of experience to comprehend that I cannot be afraid to lose or make mistakes, and that I learn best from mistakes. I try to instill this in my sons, hoping that they would not be paralyzed by the fear of failure. Every sport presents experiences of failure, particularly baseball because if you make a defensive error early in a baseball game, that error may be the reason your team loses despite your best efforts.

Yet, instead of backing away from failure, I tell my boys to rise to any challenge, and that it is okay to fail or lose because you can learn from it and be better in the future. To most of us, this is sententious and trite because we hear it in so many ways from so many inconsequential people, but one thing I rarely heard as a child was that failure was okay only if I learned a lesson from it and strove to not replicate the error. In this sense, baseball normalized me because it made me confront failure, embrace its lessons, and be diligent about moving past it instead of dwelling on it or, even worse, giving up altogether. I pray that my sons will step forward willingly to meet every challenge, every ground ball, every line drive, and catch that ball or make that play. Win or lose, we can grow from the moment and revel in the idea that we never backed down. To me, that is "normal."

Settlers of Canaan: 1HN Catan Redux

Among Christians, there seems to be a trend towards taking "secular" games and adding a Judeo-Christian flavor to it. The obvious examples of this are such games as Bible Scattergories and Bible Taboo (which is funnily ironic name), but some lesser-known ones are Ark of the Covenant, which was based on Carcassonne, and Redemption, which was the Christian community's response to Magic: The Gathering (it was not a copy of its gameplay, but it copied the collectability of Magic). Yet another prime example is Settlers of Canaan, which is the spitting image of Settlers of Catan.

Settlers of Canaan is, by and large, the same game as Catan. Much like Catan, the Settlers of Canaan board is laid out in hexagons with each one producing one of five resources: grain, sheep, wood, clay, and ore; and, each hex has a number from 2 to 12. You start off with placing a settlement and a road at the vertices of three hexagons. After each player has laid out two settlements and two roads (the two settlements may or may not connect to each other), they gather up one card for each resource their settlements touch. Then, gameplay begins. For those who are familiar with Catan, Canaan is very similar: a player rolls two dice, and then all players, including the rolling player, collect resource cards for each hex that their settlements touch that matches the number rolled. After that, the current player gets to trade resources with other players and build settlements, cities, and roads, or acquire development cards depending on which resources he or she possess. Canaan's Development cards are also similar to Catan's development cards, except that there are "Priest" cards instead of "Knight" cards and there are thematic cards that are similar in effect to Catan cards, but named differently. As in Catan, Canaan has bonuses for the longest road (two points) and most priests (two points). There are also developments that award victory points, just as in Catan. 

It would be too easy to state that Catan and Canaan are essentially the same game, but there are four key differences. The first difference is that the hexes in Canaan are fixed in position on a gameboard, whereas the hexes and numbers are randomly placed at the start of each game in Catan. This gives Catan a fresh feel every game, while Canaan's board is set (yet sufficiently balanced in its placement of resources, in my opinion). The second difference is that the Canaan has Jerusalem and its wall at the lower part of the board; players can add a stone to the wall of Jerusalem by spending the appropriate resources during their turns. Whoever has a majority of stones in Jerusalem's wall gets a two-point bonus and a favorable trade ratio of two of any resource chosen for the "King's Blessing" in exchange for one of any other resource. The third key difference is the Robber: in Catan, if you roll a 7, you control the Robber, a nefariously black token that can be placed on a hex, rendering that hex ineffective until the Robber is moved. In addition, the player who places the Robber can then take a card from a player whose settlement is touching the occupied hex. Thus, it is called the "Robber." However, in Canaan, the Robber is called "the Plague." It works the same way as in Catan, except that a dark stone is placed in Jerusalem's wall. Lastly, there is a copper hex that provides one resource of a player's choice if a 10 is rolled and a player has a settlement touching that hex; this is somewhat minor, yet noteworthy because there is no "wild" tile in Settlers of Catan and this may affect early-game settlement placement.

Gameplay continues in Canaan until a player gains twelve victory points, which is two more than Catan, thus extending the game a bit. Points are tracked on the gameboard on a separate counter, so the need for math during the game is reduced (unlike Catan, in which there is no scoreboard and you have to constantly count people's settlements and cities). As with Catan, the accumulation of settlements and cities is important, but the most fun part of both games is negotiation. Can I get the ore and grain I need to transform my one-point settlement into a two-point city? Will someone trade me that clay I need to build that settlement? Will I get that clay and stone I need to allow me to lay that precious stone in Jerusalem so that I can take the King's Blessing from someone? All of these questions are more often solved in trading than with mere dice rolls; this is the beauty of Catan and Canaan.

The Settlers of Canaan, much like Catan, is a wonderful family game that also serves as a gateway game to more complex Euro-style games, which are often economy-based with indirect competition. In Canaan, you don't trounce your opponents as much as lock them out of certain hexes with key settlement placements. In this way, I can see how Cactus Game Design saw that they could tweak the classic Catan with a Judeo-Christian theme and it would be palatable for Christian families. I certainly understand that sentiment and am appreciative of it, but I admit that, of all games, Catan was one game that didn't need a makeover. By itself, it's a fine family game that is non-violent and only as cutthroat as the players who play it. I have played Catan and Canaan and found that Catan would be just as agreeable as Canaan, if not better because Catan has a bevy of expansions from which you can enhance the game. One thing I should mention is that I suppose that the concept of "stealing" wasn't Christian enough, so the "Robber" was changed to a "Plague, but is "Plague" really better than a "Robber?" I mean, I know that it's wrong and sinful to steal, but it's a legitimate game action to take someone's card with the Robber/Plague; if it's a legit move, is it really "robbing?" In my opinion, it is this kind of kneejerk reaction to secondary elements in games that often drives the Christian-theme market (and sells games to overly "religious" people).

This takes me to a point I made in a previous post about magic: I don't have a hard and fast rule against all references to magic in games. If magic is an integral part of a game, I make a determination about whether it would affect me and my sons or not. However, if it's an ancillary part of the game, such as it is in the Zelda video games or in such board games as Dominion, I may allow it depending on the imagery and the rules. I look at Catan in the same way when it comes to "robbing"; I know it's not stealing in the sinful sense, and I know that it's defined in the rules. Why can't we just call it "robbing" instead of a "Plague," which just sounds even more awful, in my opinion?