Agricola

This game is as advertised. Agricola on your phone. My siblings and I were hoping to have long-term asynchronous games going, and that is possible BUT. There is one MAJOR issue and it is the reason I gave one star. The app does not notify me saying “ITS MY TURN”. That is literally such an easy thing to implement and why it doesn’t have that option is beyond me. This leads to me entering the app 500 times a day to see if it’s my turn and it makes for a tedious and unpleasant experience because of this.

Many occupations just don’t work, the checkbox to proceed often never shows up, etc. The game is currently unplayable.

Longtime user of the app here (bought it around 2013 for my iphone 5). I remember wanting to play the board game but could not figure out how to play it (or set it up). I had heard that setup for the actual board game would take a while. Good thing we have electronic adaptations of games! It took a little trial and error to learn how to play (and losses to the computer) but I got up to speed sooner than I would have with the board game. For those new to it the word Agricola is latin for farmer. The game is about farming and taking care of yourself and your family in a medieval setting. Points are given not merely for “making it” but making it in style and with a good sized family and farm; you start in the negative and must build certain things, grow/expand your farm, and accomplish certain goals to get yourself in the positive. Do you go for upgrading your house all the way to stone and focus on herding cattle or do you decide that expanding your house and farm and the number of children is more important? More children equals more “workers” to place but it also means more mouths to feed so be prepared. From a design perspective I’d call it a medium weight game a lot more strategy than your average worker-placement game. Agricola veterans out there know that it’s packed with so much strategy and choice that it’s pretty close to chess in that respect. A victory in this game is extremely rewarding with a loss feeling like you are learning how to become better at the game. If you like more of a chill, less competitive vibe you can also play it solo which is also pretty fun. Multiplayer is very cool too. Overall a very good adaptation that might be better than the actual board game it adapts. Extra points to excelling at bringing out the theme of the game- the music and overall aesthetic are quite good.

It is a game worth 5 stars. But I write this review to report a card issue. The occupation “Organic Farmer “ gives us 1 bonus point at the end of game for each pasture with at least one animal and can still contain 3 or more animals. This card is fine. There’s another occupation called “Tenant Farmer”, who gives us one animal of each type immediately, and ask us to return the same animals by the end of game or we lose points. And when I play this card, your app will automatically return animals for me before final scoring and I don’t get to choose for myself. Here’s the problem, once I had both two cards, at the last harvest, after new animals were bred, I needed to ensure the exact position of all my animals in order to get the most points from Organic Farmer. I put them in the pastures in the way that after I returned the correct animals, I would receive 3vp. But the annoying part is that I couldn’t decide which one animal will be returned, and your app automatically returned the wrong animals for me, causing me ending up with only 1vp from Organic Farmer. There’s nothing I can do, because you don’t give us any available choices. I am very disappointed. I understand that you wanted to save us some time, so you designed the cards like this. It is a good thing, very convenient. But since I mentioned the problem here, I hope you can modify the card “ Tenant Farmer”. We should be able to decide which one animal to return by ourselves, or we should have another action to rearrange our farms before scoring. That’s all I want to say here, the card with problem is the occupation “Tenant Farmer”, please fix it some time, we need flexible options while returning animals. Thank you very much!

Great game but the digital version is very hard to keep track of what’s going on or what you’re trying to achieve. Better suited to a board.

The game is basically not usable without notifications otherwise amazing game. Please fix! I’ve already opened a ticket and no response.

I am happy, that Agricola works again. Not sure what fixed it, since there wasn‘t an update of it in a while. I did a reset (home + top button) of my iPad. Maybe that helped? No matter what, I do love, love love the game. It is a great implementation of the board game. Kudos to the developer.

Worked fine playing locally on one iPad! Two issues we experienced: The rule menu stopped working mid game, which was difficult for my wife and I as novices. I’m thinking it was a glitch? Second was we didn’t like seeing a recap of the round every time it arrived on our turn. I’m sure that feature is helpful when you’re playing on multiple devices, but it slowed down the pace of our game locally. It would be nice if there was a way to turn that feature off. Will update as we play more. Great experience overall!