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    The Farming Game
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    The Weekend Farmer

    The Farming Game

    4.7
    €83,00
    €83,00
    €136,00
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    Save 39% (€53,00)
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    Description

    • An Economic based board game
    • Players act as the farmers, who can buy fields, pastures and ridges
    • The board also activates the weather cycles and time of year
    • The players make their way from winter to fall
    • For 2-6 players
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    Customer Reviews

    Great family game!My family absolutely loves this game! It can take a bit to learn as there are several steps per turn, and rules to follow with them, but once you know how to play it can be addicting! We play this nearly every time we are together and keep records of who wins. This is a great way for us to stay connected and have a great time together as a family! The boardgame is in a great medium-sized box for storage, came in great condition, and we love this edition with the puzzle pieces. I know it isn't original, but it is nifty. It is a long game to play, similar to monopoly, but worth it. Would definitely recommend this game to everyone, and I do! 5Favorite boardgame for last 27 years. Updated with different pieces.Our family had one of the first versions of The Farming Game from way back when it was independently produced. GREAT game. I used to play it for hours by myself.If you haven't played The Farming Game before:* This is a great game that involves a limited amount of competition, a fair amount of luck, and a lot of strategy.* The choices you're given vary each time you play and you have to make strategy decisions based on those choices - you can't play it the same way every time. - Do you go in debt or not? - Do you buy a lot of Cows? (low start-up cost, high ongoing expense, high reward) - Should you put your money into Fruit? (high cost, high risk, high reward) - Is it even worth buying Hay? (low risk, low reward)Because your opportunities vary based on the cards you draw the answers to those questions may be different each game.* The game can take a long time and is more fun with at least three players or at least three farms in operation (see previous statement about playing by myself)* If you're playing it with kids for the first time I recommend playing it individually with them, one on one, first so that they understand the rules without a lot of competition.* As regards the competition aspect - in this game you are trying to run a successful farm - you are competing with others for options to purchase limited resources but other than that you are playing pretty independently of the others who are playing with you. The one with the most money at the end wins but that is a small part of the game. You can allow trading for resources so that each person specializes or you can make it more competitive by prohibiting trades. If you play with four or more players it will naturally be more competitive because the available acreage (the Option to Buy cards) will be spread over a larger number of farms.If you have played The Farming Game before:* This updated version is almost exactly the same as the original version, with the following differences: - Instead of the colorform type of vinyl acreage this game has puzzle pieces - Instead of uniform acreage this has 1 x and 3 x units (10/30 acres of hay or grain, 5/15 acres of fruit, 10/30 cows) that are not well marked so you have to pay more attention to the actual pieces - The OTB, Farmer's Fate, and Op Exp cards are now like playing cards not business cards (imo this is an improvement) - gameboard folds in four like more and more games today so the box takes up less space - you now buy "pregnant cows" instead of just cows. This is endlessly entertaining to the ten year old.* Other than those changes the options on the cards and spaces are all the same as they used to be, the board is the same, the play is the same, the grid is the same.This is by far my favorite game ever. If you haven't played it before it is really worth trying. If you are looking to play an old favorite this is essentially the same as the original especially when it comes to the actual game play. 5fun and surprisingly quick, but there's room for improvementI see lots of reviews telling you how much fun people had playing this game with their family, but not too many that actually explain how the game works and WHY it's fun, so that's what I'll try to do in this review.Each player starts with ten acres of hay and ten acres of grain (indicated by markers on farms on the board) and two "opportunity to buy" cards that offer you opportunities to expand into fruit or livestock, or buy more acres of grain or hay. (There are also two types of machinery available, namely tractors and harvesters, but their effect on the game is minimal.) You can pick up more "opportunity to buy" cards as you move your piece around the board.The board is heavily influenced by Monopoly: you move around the board (with one die instead of two) and collect $5,000 as you pass the equivalent of Go (here called Christmas Vacation). One circuit around the board is one game year, and approximately the last 3/4 of the board consists of various harvest seasons, which allow you to reap the rewards of your investments.Here is where the game gets interesting, and students of finance will love this bit: you determine your net harvest income by picking an "operating expense" card, and then rolling the die to determine the gross income, which is determined by your acreage (or number of cattle). Gross income minus operating expense is net income. This is how the game creates an economy of scale: because the operating expense is fixed and the gross income is basically a per-unit multiple, your margins inevitably expand as your farm grows. That's beautiful.There is a rudimentary system of credit, too. Each player has a standing $50,000 credit line from the bank, and debt can be relatively expensive early in the game if you draw inconvenient "operating expense" cards that force you to pay a percentage; but once you are debt-free, those expenses naturally go down to zero.The first player to attain a net worth of $250,000 wins the game, and it goes surprisingly fast, because harvests become quite lucrative once you have built up enough acreage. You don't get one of those tedious Monopoly marathons that won't end because nobody is in danger of going bankrupt.A few aspects of the game are annoying, however. There are far too many spaces on the board that call for you to pay or receive small sums of money (e.g., $500), and the net effect is essentially zero, so all you're really doing is wasting time passing small bills back and forth to the bank. One of the subtle beauties of Monopoly is that, often enough, NOTHING HAPPENS on your turn. It makes the eventful rolls that much more exciting. Not with The Farming Game; you're always handing money around.Also, why are there diminishing returns for grain? If you study the harvest chart, you'll see that gross income per unit is the same, regardless of the size of your holding, for every harvest type other than grain; for grain, however, there are diminishing returns as your acreage increases. That's not realistic (it would be news to agri-businesses in this country that a 10,000-acre wheat farm is less efficient than a 1,000-acre wheat farm), and considering that the instructions emphasize the advantage of scale, it seems contrary to the spirit of the game to have diminishing returns for one type of crop.I'd recommend revising the instructions, too. They're unclear on certain points--such as, for example, whether you collect a harvest whenever you PASS THROUGH a corresponding harvest period on the board, or only if you happen to LAND ON it. I assume they mean the former (less luck that way), but who knows? The wording actually suggests the latter. 4Unbalanced and too dependant on chance.I'm very torn over this game. The theme and game mechanics themselves are intriguing. Use the first quarter of the board to buy your crops, then advance through the next 3 quarters hoping to yield good harvests and keep operating costs down. The problem is that the game is unbalanced. The person who wins is the person who has the most acres of fruit. How do you get fruit acres...by hoping you get the OTB (option to buy) card that let's you get fruit and you have the cash/credit line for it. Grains and hay payout minimally and with a poor dice roll you end up paying more in operation costs than the crop even earns you. Cattle are good for the price except you can only have 2 on your land and then have to pay a huge fee to "lease" more land to put cattle on and they have the lowest chance of yielding a "harvest" on the board so the chances of them being lucrative are very low. The board spaces also don't seem to be very concise. Sometimes you'll land on a space saying you're right on time for the season and it'll send you back to the beginning of the board forcing you to miss out on late summer and fall harvest...for being "right on time" that is very punishing. The instructions also haven't been updated to the reprinted version of the game so they still refer to the vinyl crop stickers which are not what you get in this version, you get the puzzle pieces. I want to like the game, but the lack of play testing leaves it too dependant on who gets the fruit in order to win. I wouldn't recommend it. 2This is a great game! It can teach some of the basics ...This is a great game! It can teach some of the basics of accounting but it's just fun. Great learning game! It's like monopoly but doesn't have any of the bad parts that makes you want to toss the board or choke other players because players aren't really pitted directly against each other like in monopoly. It can be even better if you come up with some home brew rules. Quick tips: OTBs basically determine who will win the game. There are some Farmer's Fate cards that are too mean. Fruit pays the best. 5A surprisingly realistic game about running a farm, but fun to play!My wife used to work with the farmer who created this game. (He was on the board of a conservation nonprofit.) We played it many years ago, but gave the game away to friends. When it struck us to play the game again we were so happy to see it still for sale. It is a bit like monopoly, but different enough that it does not feel like a copy. Rather it is an excellent and fun way to help children understand the value of money, but also the potential and problems of running a small business. The full game can take several hours, so we just usually just play over two days. Well recommended and great for a rainy day. 5"...some 10 fold, some 30 fold and some 100 fold."I understand that scriptural phrase now. I spend thousands on my fruit trees, you spend the same thousands on yours and when it comes to harvest, you do significantly better than me, or maybe you miss and get nothing at all. Better luck next year. But let not your heart be troubled, next year starts right away!.The game board look s a lot like monopoly, except in this game you compete against the law of the harvest, and the proverbial boardwalk (fruit trees) is available to anyone who wants to and can afford to take on the risk of the orchards.For those of you who hate Monopoly because you can't stand taking someone's last red cent or their properties in kind, or are frustrated by how long it takes to get that cent and their property, take heart, these problems don't exist in this game.The board represents a calendar year with rentable grazing ranges for heads of cattle here and there. You go around the board like in monopoly and borrow tens of thousands of dollars at a time to purchase acres of planted crops, or heads of cattle or orchards, as well as farm machinery. Here's how it works:Game PlayYou kick the year off going through the buying season. When you land of harvest squares for the different type of good, if you've got some of that you roll to see the return on your investment and draw and expense card. Hopefully you don't go in the hole for the harvest. This is not devastating, but it is discouraging.You continue doing this paying off debt and borrowing more till you build up enough income that you have some positive net value. Whoever gets to the net value of 250,000 first wins. You can set that bar wherever you like, I suppose.I hate to tell you what to do because what do I know anyway?It's a better Idea to have your debt paid off then to have tens of thousands in debt and tens of thousands on hand because sometimes you have to pay the piper, and he's pricey.I'm partial to heads of cattle myself.ThemeI do look forward to being able to harvest, and honestly, it has the same feel as harvesting in my own life, first come the strawberries, then the raspberries, then the apricots and so on down the line till the grapes. They don't all happen at the same time, but I'm telling you, while it's true I have off years with fruit trees, I'd never have an off year with the heads of cattle, but what do I know? I apparently get sucked in enough to have it rattle my chain.BalanceIt's curious that I like this game despite the luck element. Perhaps this is because While it's possible to miss a type of harvest by rolling by it, there are several harvest spaces that you can land on, so that mitigates the chance of missing. And when the die tells you how well your harvest is, that can be pretty frustrating when your neighbor is always rolling high and you are rolling low. It's also frustrating when no good buys are available to you, but there are plenty of opportunities for buys so that's mitigated some as well. All that to say, it might not be a very fair game, but it might be- maybe. The trick it to not invest your ego in a game of chance.InteractionInteraction is medium to low. Very little you do affects others, you can feign or sincerely express empathy when someone else's bills are bigger than the take. Or you can offer unsolicited advice- always a favorite of in-laws and parents alike. And then my personal favorite: audible musings such as, "Curious, it never would have occurred to me to make a play like that."Learning CurveNil. It takes all of two minutes to explain and you are off and running.DowntimePresent- you've got to take turns, and with the rare exception of someone buying something that you would have liked to buy- a ranch for cattle, As I said, there's very little that anyone does that affects you. It would be a curious thing though, to try to take turn simultaneously. If any of you try this, let me know how it goes. I guess you'd need several sets of dice.What's not to Like?The luck factor- but I get the impression there is a lot of luck involved with farming.It would be nice if the tractor had a larger role in the game. You can easily go through the game without purchasing any. Wouldn't it be nice if it acted as a modifier for your harvest? Maybe you get to reroll for harvests if you get a 1 or something like that. Then you could make the same rule for rolling a 2 if you have a harvester, too. I think I've come up with some good house rules.Collateral EndorsementMy 2, 4, and 6 year old love putting all the little puzzle pieces together. It's called "the cows game" We haven't done anything with the actual board yet. 4As close to farming as you can get without planting your backside on a tractor.When a friend introduced me to The Farming Game, I was tickled to see all of the names on the board came from the area of Washington State where I raised my kids. (Too bad they don't provide a pronunciation guide! But then, it was fun teaching folks who had played the game for years how to say the town and mountain names properly.)Imagine playing monopoly where you're not aiming to own the bank; instead you're shooting for a successful planting or cattle season. It's a lot of fun, and the obstacles and issues you have to deal with in the play are very, very real for farmers in that part of the country. It's not easy to fight the weather, the bugs, the diseases, the market crashes and more and come out on top. Sometimes you win by investing in cattle, sometimes fruit, sometimes ground crops. Often you just learn why farmers say they are "land rich and dirt poor."At first glance, the rules are rather daunting, but if you just start playing, you get the swing of it quickly enough. I'd say it takes a little more thought than monopoly, but not much.My wife and I played the game recently with some friends. The male half of this couple told us he doesn't particularly like board games. But after one evening of play (he was the cattle baron in the group... risky, but he pulled it off), they ordered FOUR games to hand out to family and friends as Christmas gifts. I sent one off to my daughter and her family, too. 5Not a board game fan but this is FUNLove this game. Our daughter asked for it for Christmas after playing it in a class in Middle School. Fun with two players. So many board games are no fun for two....just as much fun with two as four. NOT like any other game. I don't play Monopoly anymore because there is just not any FUN to it. The rules are simple and the play is very interactive....LOVE this game. 5A lot more fun than Monopoly!I enjoy playing this game because there seems to be a purpose. I think the directions could be a little clearer on the values of certain property. Once we learned that what we PAID for the item WAS the value, the game made a little more sense. We set a time limit or you will be playing for 6 hours. It is competitive but loads of fun! My son-in-law introduced us to the game. His is from the 1970s. 5
    The Farming Game

    The Farming Game

    4.7
    You can't add more than 500 quantity.
    €83,00
    €83,00
    €136,00
    Sold out
    Save 39% (€53,00)