Farming

Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small is a new take on Uwe Rosenberg's Agricola designed for exactly two players and focused only on the animal husbandry aspect of that game. So long plows and veggies!

In Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small, you become an animal breeder of horses, cows, sheep and pigs and try to make the most of your pastures. Players start with a 3x2 game board that can be expanded during play to give more room for players to grow and animals to run free. Sixteen possible actions are available for players to take, with each player taking three actions total in each of the eight rounds.

The player who amasses the most victory points through enclosing space with fences and acquiring the largest number and variety of animals and victory point-generating buildings will be the winner.

Four Standard Buildings and 4 special buildings are available in the base game. These buildings each provide unique special abilities during play and/or VP at game end. Balancing the tension between building infrastructure (fenced pastures and buildings) and acquiring animals (the single biggest source of end-game scoring) is the key to success!

Mind the fields of Gullsbottom! Plant and fertilize your seeds, tend your crops, and utilize the various buildings at your disposal. You'll need to work smarter, not harder, as harvest season is coming to an end! Who will have the best harvest this year? Will it be you?

Each round in Harvest, you first draft turn order (and the benefits that come with it), then send your two workers into town and into the fields. Plant seeds, tend fields, and harvest crops to make room to plant some more! Utilize buildings and magical elixir to amass a bigger and better harvest than your neighbors at the end of five rounds of play.

The low land is a rough area where hard-working folk make a living by the sweat of their brow. Under constant threat of storm and flood, communities here rally together to build dikes that keep the rising water at bay. But every citizen constructing a dike is one fewer citizen tending flocks and maintaining the family farm. The residents here are constantly torn between selflessness and self-interest, and only those who can strike this delicate balance can thrive in this harsh landscape.

In Lowlands, you carve your farm out of this unforgiving land, gathering and spending resource cards to transform your farmyard into pastures that allow you to profit from breeding sheep. Adding expansions to your farm will unlock new options and score you victory points, but helping to build the dike that collectively protects all players is also rewarded. No matter what, the tide will rise and, if the dike isn't high enough, it could rush in and sweep away your hard-earned profits. Will you sacrifice your own farm for the good of the community, or will you pursue your own agenda? The choice is yours.

Even without the poor weather, life on a farm is one of constant work where you find yourself tending flocks of sheep, extending their pastures, and looking for the right moment to sell them for a profit. To complete all these tasks, Lowlands gives you a group of farmers that you can assign to various tasks around your farm. To get the most out of them, you must think strategically, deciding which actions you want to take and the best time to take them. Once they've been assigned, your farmers help you build a bustling farm where there was once scrubby bushes, trees, and lakes. You begin the game with only two sheep and a small pasture, but your farmyard is rife with possibilities, its many empty spaces inviting you to customize your farm as you see fit.

While you could simply focus on creating more area for your sheep to roam, the game also provides plenty of options for customizing your farm with various buildings and features. Not only are these tiles worth victory points at the end of the game, they also make your farm more efficient and more profitable. You might add a feeding trough to your farm, for example, to immediately earn another sheep and the ability to house two sheep per pasture space instead of just one. Or you could construct a lake cabin on your property to get away from it all for a bit. While this tile doesn't give you any special abilities, it increases the value in victory points of the farmyard spaces immediately adjacent to it. Ultimately, you are free to pursue whatever strategy you see fit, building a farm wholly your own.

On top of the challenges of building a successful farm, of course, you also have to deal with the tempestuous weather that comes with living on the wave-battered coast of the North Sea. Here, the tides always seem to rise a little higher, threatening to take a dent out of your profits by sweeping away some of your flock. To ensure that this doesn't happen, you always have the opportunity to send your farmers to contribute to the dike instead of working on your farm. When you do, you also commit resources to creating dike elements that are added to the board as a buffer against the rising waters. Add enough of these pieces and you might prevent disaster for everyone. The tide turns repeatedly, bringing with it new flood pieces. If there are enough dike elements in place to hold back the rising waters, players' farms are spared. If the dike breaks, however, you could be forced to take dike breach tokens that have adverse effects at the end of the game.

While lending a hand with the dike at the expense of your own farm is certainly a nice gesture that keeps everyone safe from the floodwaters, it has rewards of its own. For each resource you contribute to the dike, you advance one step up the dike track. Not only does advancing far enough on this track grant victory points, it also amplifies your reward if the dike holds and lessens the blow when it breaks. It is in your best interest, then, to keep pace with other players on the dike in order to protect your investments back home one the farm.

—description from the publisher

You have been assigned to lead an ancient monastery and its brewery. Now it's your time to brew the best beer under God's blue sky!

The fine art of brewing beer demands your best timing. In order to get the best results of your production, you have to provide your cloister's garden with fertile resources and the right number of monks helping with the harvest — but keep your brewmaster in mind as he is ready and eager to refine each and every one of your barrels!

In Heaven & Ale, you have to overcome the harsh competition of your fellow players. There is a fine balance between upgrading your cloister's garden and harvesting the resources you need to fill your barrels. Only those who manage to keep a cool head are able to win the race for the best beer!

—description from the publisher

"Wendake" is the name that the Wyandot People use for their traditional territory. This population, also known as the Huron Nation, lived in the Great Lakes region together with the Iroquois, Shawnee, Potomac, Seneca, and many others. In this game, you explore the traditions and everyday life of these tribes during the 1756-1763 period when the Seven Years War between the French and the English took place in these territories.

But this white man's war is really only a marginal aspect of the game; the focus is on life in the Native villages, fields, and forests. In this game, you won't find the traditional teepees since those were used by southwestern tribes who moved their camps to follow the herds of buffalo. The Natives of the Great Lakes were sedentary, living in long houses. The women farmed beans, corn, and pumpkins, while men hunted beavers in the forests, mainly to sell their pelts as leather.

In the game Wendake, you are placed in the shoes of a chief of a Native American tribe. You have to manage all of the most important aspects of their lives, earning points on the economic, military, ritual, and mask tracks. The core of the game is the action selection mechanism: You have the opportunity to choose better and better actions over seven game rounds, and the winner will be the player who can find the best combinations of actions and use them to lead their tribe to prosperity. Each player has their own 3x3 action board that is comprised of nine action tiles. The first time you select an action tile each year, you may choose any tile; the second and third times that year, you must choose another action tile in the same column, row, or diagonal as your previously selected tile(s). If the action tile you choose shows more than one action, you can use them only in the order shown, from top to bottom. After the last player has placed (and resolved) their fourth action marker, the restore phase begins.

During the restore phase, all players remove the action markers from their tiles and flip the tiles they used face down so that they show the opposite side. All players then move their action tiles down one row so that the top line of their action grid is empty and the three tiles from their bottom row are now outside of the grid; if any of these three tiles shows the ritual side, they must be flipped back to the action side. The first player may now set aside one of the three tiles below their grid and replace it with one of the six advanced action tiles near the board or with any action tile they already set aside in previous years. This new tile is added to the tiles below the player's grid. Then, whether a new tile was taken or not, they shuffle the three tiles that are below their grid and place them in random order on the top line of their grid, all showing the action side.

During the game, you score points in four tracks, with these tracks being coupled randomly at the beginning of the game. The game ends at the end of the seventh year, and for each pair of tracks, you score only the number of points indicated by the score marker on the lower value. Sum these points from the two pairs of score tracks to see who wins.