Matt Carlson: A Game About Farming

Have a hankering to play a boardgame themed around trying to scratch a subsistence off the land?  Cultivate crops and harvest them in order to try and provide for your family.  What game am I talking about, none other than The Farming Game.  Wait, were you thinking about some other farming game?

Both sets of my grandparents were farmers in Iowa, so I have a soft spot for farming, my parents would discuss the status of the various fields we passed every time we drove into town.  Now, despite nearly a complete lack of lawn space, I dug up a nice chunk of my lawn just to put in a small garden – I have to farm what I can I guess.  My love of boardgames was well known to my extended family so one day when I arrived at my grandparent’s farm for a visit, they pulled out a new game to play with me, The Farming Game.  Good times were had trying to make it as a farmer when playing against my grandparents, aunts, and uncles.  I rarely play the game anymore, but I still have fond memories of playing, which surely help cloud my judgment in the game’s favor.

In a horrible PR move for the game, the first three words in its description on the Geek is “Similar to Monopoly”.  As a mild fan of the game I simply must take umbrage at this comparison.  Sure, it is a roll and move mechanism around the outside of a square board divided into sections like Monopoly, but the game also has many resemblances to designer games in the economic or engine building genres.

One of my favorite aspects of the game is the strong theme.  The game board is laid out roughly according to a single year, each side of the board corresponding to seasons.  Players begin the game as a part-time farmer with a hefty loan from the bank to set up their initial farm.  The first player to earn $100,000 gets to quit their part time job, start farming full time, oh and they also win the game.  To earn money, players invest in land for farming a specific crop (hay, grain, fruit, or cattle) and then harvest from their land whenever they land on an appropriate space.  Hay and grain are less lucrative, but have less risk – a harvest is more likely and some events are particularly bad for fruit or cattle owners.  A typical game consists of players focusing on a bit of hay and/or grain until they can save up enough money to get into the fruit and cattle market.  Once a few good harvests have been made for the pricier goods, there is a bit of a race to buy up available land to reach the final $100,000 mark.

The mechanics of the game do contain a few flaws, but the small touches that bring out the theme of the game are what make the game enjoyable to me.  The basic premise that farming is tough, you start in debt and spend a good portion of the game just trying to get back out of debt provides me with a great source of black humor.  One particularly cruel mechanic stands out, every time a player harvests a crop, they must also pay for operating expenses.  A single die is rolled and a chart is referenced to indicate the income for that harvest.  An expense card is then drawn from a deck and the player must also pay the operating expenses shown on the card.  If the harvest roll is particularly low, players can end up losing money for the turn – yay! 

The board laid out as a yearly calendar also works well.  Players may only invest in new land during the winter months, setting up what they grow so that new fields can’t be planted in the middle of harvest time.  Meanwhile, the harvest squares are set out in groups so that hay can be harvested up to four times per year (cutting hay throughout the year is not uncommon), grain is harvested twice (once for corn, once for wheat), fruit harvesting seasons are quite short (and often passed over on a poor roll), and cattle is only sold off once per year.  Since players move around by rolling dice the pricier crops (which are also less reliable) are sometimes skipped entirely in a year’s circuit around the board.

My main regret lies with the slightly sub-par game mechanics that could use a little tweaking.  There are a lot of random factors in the game, rolling dice for movement as well as harvests.  While I think the roll-and-move aspect of the game interacts well with the risk management of harvest times, the highly fluctuating value of harvest rolls can significantly impact a game.  Low harvest rolls can slow the game down, while a few lucky high rolls can launch a player out far ahead of the pack making it difficult to catch up.  Since there is not a lot of player interaction within the game, there isn’t an opportunity for the other players to help restore play balance.  Hand in hand with harvest roll issues, I suspect to win the game a player must gain and maintain a decent collection of fruit (or get fairly lucky with cattle).  Once a player gets a couple good harvests of fruit, they have plenty of spare cash to reinvest in their economic engine, helping to maintain their lead.

Since I enjoy the game primarily due to the theme and less for its mechanics, it takes a special crowd for me to think about bringing the game out to play.  My enjoyment of the game and the past decade or so of playing designer games might provide me with the background I need to take a stab at trying to fix up some of my objections to the game.  I would definitely try to fix up the harvest rolls to make them slightly more averaged.  Players are already limited in crop selection because they need a special card to be able to expand.  However, there may be a way to change the way cropland is acquired so that player interaction increases and the value of the various types of crops is slightly more balanced.

Even if I never play the game again (which I doubt will happen, I will need to at least introduce my son to the game a few years down the road), I won’t remove it from my collection.  The theme and memories of the game make it too valuable to let it go.

Any other theme-a-philes out there with a game or two that might not be so great mechanically, but is still worth playing just for the experience it provides?

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