Well, I and Chaz and his daughter Paris finished off a learning game of Agricola on Sat.  I think we finally played the game as it was intended and didn't do too many mistakes.  It tooks us about 3 hours since neither Chaz & Paris have played before and it's a bit overwhelming for Paris (who is 9) since this is much more complex than Catan or Carcassone.

    We played using only E deck and I got mostly late game occupations, so the only thing I ended playing was Plough Maker and only used it once.  In retrospect I probably should have used one of the other occupation instead.  The resources were much better since there is now an additional 2 wood, 1 clay, 2 any resources and 1 any resource. 

    Chaz & Paris caught on fairly quick (it's not a real hard game) and they were mostly concentrated on raising livestock while I went for raising grains & vegetables.  The wood resources were building up faster than we can used them, so I took advantage by getting the reeds first and building up 1 more room & then the family growth.

     They both have the fireplace and were able to feed by killing sheep, I had to save up for the Stone oven.  I finally build up the grain and start to expend my fields while they played improvements.

    Chaz upgraded to clay building and then finally built one more room and expend.  At this point I think Paris was kind of lost since she didn't really know what choice to make, plus Chaz jumped ahead and grabbed the wild boar before she can.  I started to build my first pasture and grab the remaining sheep.   I have a card that allow me to convert 1 sheep to 1 cattle but I was not able to capitalize on it.  We were close to endgame (stage 12) and I decide to start saving up for the final renovate/fence plus I need to bake one more time to feed the family.

    I ended up with 37 and Chaz had 17 and Paris 16.  The main thing was they have a lot of unused farm space which they didn't know were penalty.  However for a learning game, they did quite well since they were always able to feed during harvest and have 2 or more pastures.  I miscalculated in mid game and didn't have enough grain and too much vegetables, I also should have build a cooking health (all the cheap one were gone) to convert the vegetables to food instead of my grain.  I need to grow my family at least one more times since I was at least a couple actions short toward the end.

    The main difference between solitaire and multiplayers: action is more important than resource.  Someone else may have just taken the action you needed and hence you have to plan ahead at least one stage or more. 

    You also need to expend the family quickly to get more done, probably around 2nd harvest but depending on how much food you build up.  Grain is efficient (3:1) but you have to use bake & a fire place or oven.  Livestock repro rate is fairly slow since you only get 1 per harvest once you have 2+ of same type.  I usually wait until there is 2 or more before taking them into my pasture.  Chaz has the berry picker which he used very effectively in early stages to get at least 1 free food from taking wood at the same time.

    Agricola is very challenging in multiplayers mode since your action can affect the other players.  There are a great many of choices but only so many action(base on family size) to do them.  Agricola reminds me of a more fine tuned Puerto Rico but with more interactions and MtG where the cards break the rule to give it a distinct variety.  You are constantly seeking to improve your position with the need to generate the food to feed the family.  You constantly have to modify your strategy since you may not be able to do what you wanted unless you spend the precious action to be First Player.  Your cards (Occupation & Minor Improvement) can influence your actions but you can choose to ignore them if they don't fit.  There will be lots of trial and error since there is no perfect strategy.  The path to victory depends on your decisions and a bit of luck.  I can see why it's the number one rated replacing PR.

    I finally got my copy of Agricola (from Game Kastle) and it came with the Z-Deck!!!   Now I just need to find the time to analysis the decks.  I have only open the E Deck to play with Chaz & Paris.  They have another copy there which probably also have the Z-Deck from the pre-order promo.

    Game Kastle is a new FLGS located on 1350 Coleman Ave. in Santa Clara, just across the street from the Costco on the back side of San Jose Airport.  The place have been there for at least since last year since I remember their attendance at Kublacon last year.  They are next to a trophy shop and an auto body shop.  They are located fairly close to Santa Clara University, which may be their source of clients.  They have their website and even a forum plus they answer their email fairly quickly.  I sent them a query about avail of Agricola and got a reply within couple of hours.  Their weekend events seem to be well attended, so may be there is a regular group there.  I even recognize some of their 40K attendees as grognards who attend Pacificon regularly.  I think they are some of the old core group for Raid over Dunfrey.

Their website, check out their photo gallery

http://www.gamekastle.com/

    Game Kastle reminded me of Game Table(Campbell, Larry Duffield) from the 80's, you have the main store and then next to it a game room (plus a garage converted into miniature gaming area).  The store is fairly large and have a very good selection of games (board, miniatures, rpg & others).  Parking is not much problem since you can use the area from the other two stores on off-hours and weekend.  The game room is fairly large, hold at least 5 rows of tables.  They are located next to Costco, McDonald & Starbuck, everything you need to feed and caffinate you gamers.  I'm guessing that Miniatures is their main source of income but they have a surprisingly large selection of board games.  With the demise of most mall based FLGS and the competition from online sources, I was kind of surprise to find a retail store that offer space for gaming and have a good selection of games.  This is a good alternative place to game if Greg's wonderful game room is not avail, it's located fairly close to the freeway (101) and only about 15 min. from my house using city streets.

I have started to play with the I (interactive) and K (complex) decks and scoring have average to about 48 so far.

Some of the newer cards do modify end game or have higher requirement (like having 3 occupation).  So it does force you to decide if it's worthwhile to play them or just max out for standard scoring.

E deck -- look like mostly early game --  resource adds, reduce cost, bonus resources, bonus actions

I deck -- early/mid games -- TBD (looks the same as E)

K deck -- mid/late games -- bonus score, other players actions

I wish I have the decks to do a more detail analysis.

My occupation favorites:  Master Brewer, Baker, Meat Seller, Hedge Keeper, Wood Cutter, Clay Mixer, Mushroom Collector, Renovator, Seasonal Worker, Stable Hand, Field Watchman

My minor improvement favorites:  Fishing Rod, Baker's Oven, Baking Tray, Simple Fireplace (and then upgrade to the Cooking Health), Raft, Wooden Oven, Ceramic, Basket, Builder's Trowel, Quarry (this one is tough, 4 occupations), Stone Tongs, Drinking Troug

All these are from E deck which is the one I'm most familiar with.

Baking is very efficient use of grain for conversion, unfortunately there is only 1 bake bread option (during sow/bake) unless you end up with the Baker.

I also like the cross action cards, like get food while cutting wood or something similar.

As the action phases get less and less for each stage, you have to expand your family size or you will simply run out of actions.  Plus increase family size affect final score, but then you have to feed them.

This game is certainly more complex then Puerto Rico.  It may seems like you are playing solitaire, but adding in l and K deck create more interaction between players.  You can still screw each other depending on the action you take since only 1 person can do that per action phase.

At the final scoring, you have to watch out for missing out on category (having no cattle or vegetables)  which generates -1 pt each or even worse the begging cards -3 each.

        After learning Agricola at Conquest 2008, I find myself wondering how the full game would have worked if we were playing it correctly.  I downloaded the rules from Zman site and also a wonderful solitaire play aide from BGG.  I spent the last 3 nights learning the rules and playing the game.  So far I have only played with the E-deck but I will adding the more advanced stuff shortly.

        I now understand why this game is ranked as the new #1 on BGG and Spiel of Jahr winner.  Agricola reminded me of Settler of Catan, Magic and a number of other great games.  There is enough variations that no two plays are the same.

        Your opening hands of Occupation cards and Minor Improvement cards can help shaped your moves.  The  top issues are how best to feed your folks and spend your precious actions to expand/improve your farm.  The Occupation cards and minor improvement cards are rule breakers that let you do additional things that can benefit your household.  I am starting to figure out which one to play first and which is for endgame, most of the one that generate extra resources are useful in the beginning, any that mod vp is an endgame.  There are risk in using them since you are using your action and resource that may be better off on something else.

 

         In solitaire, there is no competition for resource but this is not going to be the case when you play multiplayers.  Major resources are the wood, clay, stone, and reeds which are needed to do just about anything.  The secondary resources are free food, grain/vegetables, and sheep/wild boar/cattle.  Most of these accumulates during replenishment at beginning of each round except for free food (2 at day labor, fishing is +1 per turn) and free grain/vegetable.

        There are only 6 harvest stages and the number of rounds go like this 4-3-2-2-2-1, you score at then end of the 6th harvest.  You are limited in action per round base on the number of person in your house hold, you started with 2 but can expand as an action after 2nd stage when the Expend Family became avail.  Here's the real beauty, the actions for each stage came out in random until they are placed on the board.  Plus depending on turn order, your opponents may just have picked that one critical action you needed.  You can sacrifice a move in multiplayers and choose to be the 1st player for next round (with the additional action of playing a minor improvement).

        You can get more by expending your family (more muchikins) but they have to be feed, putting more strain on your food producing process and you eventually have to get a major improvement (cooking fire\health\oven) to process all those wonderful grain\vegetables and livestocks.

        Ultimately the score is determined by how well you managed everything(ie size of family, livestock herd, grain\vegetables, type of house & size of fields & pastures).  You can tweak the vp via improvements and you learn to appreciate how hard Farming really is.

        I am looking forward to playing Agricola in multiplayer but I'm going to lose more sleep playing solo for a while.  Currently Agricola seems to be out of print but a new print run (English) is suppose to be done in Oct.  It's pricey at $70 but it's a Euro with lots of bits.  I hope the reprint have symbols on the bits or at least provided stickers since we had a hard time figuring out which is which for resource.  Lookout Games is suppose to sell the new animalmeeples but I think the Z-Deck (additional cards, 1st edition pre-order promo) is no more unless you buy the 1st Ed (English) off Ebay.

        So far I have managed to move my score up from 32 to 52 & 62 just playing mainly with E-deck.

In my excitement to wrap up the first day of Conquest 2007, I forgot about couple of rare finds that I bought.  These were not rare games but vintage magazines from the 70’s.  Normally I don’t border with magazines and books but since finding a few obscure one on EBay, I had been paying more attentions to them during the conventions.  Most of my EBay buys have been war gaming related books (particularly those about miniature gaming from England) and a few of the older war gaming magazines like Panzerfaust/Campaign(Don Lowry), Conflict (Simulation Design Corp), Ares (SPI), The General(AH –  vol. 11 to 32) and Command (XTR – Ty Bomba).  Along the way I also obtained some WWII Campaign studies put out by Department of Army, in particular the one from German Generals that they interviewed after the war.  This meant I have to clear out some space on my bookshelf to accommodate these.  Couple of invaluable reference sources are Mark Boone’s Wargame Page which listed many of the magazines along with some cover shots, http://www.intonet.co.uk/~rblack/books.htm and http://www.rudi-geudens.be/html/history.htm  both have list of the miniature gaming books from 1957 to 1975,  http://www.acaeum.com/ which covers TSR and http://rdushay.home.mindspring.com/Museum/Index.html#SF which has most of the information about vintage RPG items.

Back to my finds, I was checking out the seller just behind Greg who I recognized as an old miniature/rpg gamer from Game Table days.  He was mostly selling old history books and some miniature magazine like The Courier, plus a lot of miniatures from both historical periods and RPG.  He also had a copy (fair condition) of The Dragon #1 which he was pricing out at $150, the main reason is that WoTC had discontinued printing The Dragon magazine and may be planning to release it in digital download format.  I had no interested in the miniatures (too heavy to carry home) and I don’t think I would have pay for the Dragon (the oldest Dragon I owned is around #36).  However he has a couple of box of miscellaneous magazines sitting on the floor that a lot of folks had dig through, these were his 50 cent boxes.  I decided to take a quick look and not really expecting much of anything.  I found this little magazine called Strategic Review (#6) and also another one called Little Wars (#10).  Skimming quickly through both, I discovered that they were by a company called TSR (Lizard Logo) and published around 1975-76.  They have articles about RPG (reference to new class called Bard) and war games like Fight in the Skies.  Since these were published around the time of Panzerfaust, I decided to snap them up for 50 cents each.  Of course I had no idea what they were, but any gaming publications from 30 years ago are pretty hard to find.  I was going to resell them if they turned out to be worth keeping.

When I got home, I did a quick search and found out that these were actually rare and hard to find magazines.  These were put out by TSR when they had no idea about the popularity of this little game called Dungeons and Dragons.  There were only 7 issues of Strategic Review and 12 issues of Little Wars before everything was folded into The Dragon, the rest is history since The Dragon was effectively the house organ for TSR.  Between the two, Strategic Review was worth around $35 and Little Wars was round $10-20.  This is not bad for couple of old rags from the 50 cents boxes.  That’s what I like about the flea market at the gaming convention; one never knows what one might find.  So before you clear out those rags in the garage, you better goes through them first.  They may be worth much more than you think.