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!
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- happy pride month
- diversity inclusion and that's for everybody
- patience is a virtue
- play games
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- Easy to teach and quick to play
- Introduces worker-placement concepts in a compact form
- Cute, approachable aesthetic with clear sense of progression
- Limited depth for seasoned players
- Tension can hinge on short-term resource luck
- Farming and animal husbandry
- Farmstead, pastoral village
- light, strategic
- Hanabi
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Resource management — manage wood and other resources to complete fences and farm improvements
- worker placement — players assign family members to actions to gather resources and build a farm
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- it's a great short one to play with your partner
- the aim is to get rid of all of your cards
- This isn't a board game there isn't a board there are no cards there are no plastic or wooden pieces
- the feeling you get from solving a case it's even better than beating pandemic
- it's such a satisfying two-player game
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- We crushed it.
- Stardew Valley is incredible.
- The theme really comes out in Obsession.
References (from this video)
- Lighter than full Agricola
- Cute animal components
- Engaging fence-building mechanic
- Shorter play time
- No feeding mechanism
- Limited worker moves per round
- Very tight decision space
- Animal husbandry and farm management
- Farm with animals
- Lighter variant of Agricola
- Agricola
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Enclosure Building — Creating pasture areas with fences
- set collection — Collecting variety of animals for points
- tile placement — Building fences to enclose animals and pastures
- worker placement — Limited worker placement with only 2 moves per round
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
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- Monopoly can do that to people
- you don't want to play games that you can't win and Monopoly is one of those games
- the dice ain't nice and the dice will hurt you
- I want you to come back yeah yes that's what you're doing
- these games we've been sitting there you know we passed by them on the Shelf
- if you already know the story yes of each and every Christmas that's how they all go before you see the movie
- I have a lot of fun with that game because you win almost all the time
- it's a tough one
- I lost Jimmy that way
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- we would laugh till we cry somebody's gonna get eaten by a shark
- thank the Lord because you have no family fee
- it's kind of like a Gateway into area majority
- me and Grant love that game