Agricola
Agricola Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Game Idea
Central Europe, around 1670 A.D. The Plague which has raged for centuries has finally been overcome. The civilized world is revitalized. People are upgrading and extending their simple wooden houses. Fields must be plowed, sowed, and harvested. People are living off millet gruel, bread, and vegetables. The famine of the previous years has also encouraged them to eat more meat (a habit that we continue to this day as our wealth is growing).
In the end, the wealthiest player wins. Interestingly enough, animals that you do not eat contribute to your wealth.
Components
Wooden components
- 18 white sheep
- 15 black wild boar
- 13 brown cattle
- 30 brown “wood” building resource tokens
- 24 auburn “clay” building resource tokens
- 14 white “reed” building resource tokens
- 16 black “stone” building resource tokens
- 24 yellow “grain” crop tokens
- 16 orange “vegetable” crop tokens
- 1 yellow starting player token
In different player colors:
- 4x 15 fences
- 4x 4 stables
- 4x 5 people
Game boards
- 4 large farmyard boards (one for each player)
- 1 large game board
- 1 supply board for the major improvements
- 2 game board extensions (with a scoring overview and—in one case—action spaces for the multi-player game)
Tiles
- 23 wood room/field tiles
- 16 clay/stone room tiles
- 2 variant tiles (one for the 2-player game, the other for the 3- and 4-player game)
- 1 “Side Job” action space tile for the game without hand cards (with an overview of action spaces on the back side)
Markers
- 36 “1 food” markers
- 8 “5 food” markers
- 3 yellow suggestion markers (for the blitz intro)
- 10 goods tiles for various goods (with begging markers on the back sides)
120 cards
- 14 action space cards for stages 1 to 6
- 10 red “major improvement” cards
- 48 yellow “occupation” cards
- 48 orange “minor improvement” cards
As well as
- 1 scoring pad
- 10 transparent bags to organize the components
- 12-page rule book
- a 12-page appendix
Setup
We will explain the rules for 2-4 players first, followed by the solo game rules on the last page.
Your Personal Display
Choose a player color and take the five people, four stables, and 15 fences in that color.
Take a farmyard board. Place one person in each of your two wood rooms. Your remaining three people as well as your fences and stables constitute your supply. (Put the components of unused colors as well as the remaining farmyard boards back into the game box—you will not need them.)
Room and Field Tiles
Place the stack of clay/stone room tiles next to the game board. Divide the stack of wood room tiles in two, placing one half with the wood rooms facing up and the other with the field tiles facing up.
Game Board with Action Spaces
Place the game board in the middle of the play area. Depending on the number of players, take the appropriate game board extension and attach it to the game board with the proper side facing up.
Randomly determine who gets the starting player token. This player gets 2 food; each other player gets 3 food.
Improvements and Occupations
Major Improvements
Place the red (“major”) improvements on the designated spaces of the supply board. Please note that there are two Fireplaces and two Cooking Hearths.
Minor Improvements
Shuffle the orange improvements and deal each player a hand of seven cards.
Occupations
A square symbol on the left side of the yellow occupation cards indicates the number of players with which the card is used. [1+] stands for 1-4 players, [3+] stands for 3-4 players, and [4] stands for 4 players. Put the cards that you are not supposed to be using according to your number of players back into the game box. Shuffle the remaining cards and deal each player a hand of seven cards.
Action Space Cards
Shuffle the 14 action space cards and sort them by the numbers on their back sides. This should result in 6 stacks, which you must place on top of each other in descending order from bottom to top. Thus, the cards for stage 1 should be on top of those for stage 2 etc.
Place all the animals (sheep, wild boar, cattle), building resources (wood, clay, reed, stone), crops (grain, vegetables), and food markers ready at hand as the general supply.
The goods tiles with begging markers on their backs will only be needed occasionally. Place them somewhere on the side of the table—in case you need them.
- “Side Job” and Other Variant Tiles Please check pages 1 and 8 of the appendix on how to use the “Side Job” and the other two variant tiles. You will not need them in the base game.
- Suggestion Tiles
The three yellow suggestion tiles are used in games with inexperienced players and small children (see page 1 of the appendix). Usually, you will not need them at all.
General Overview
A game of Agricola is played over 14 rounds. In each round, you place each of your people on exactly one action space, taking the actions provided by it. The available actions are depicted on the game board.
In clockwise order, you take turns to place exactly one person on an action space, until all players have placed all of their people. You will necessarily get in each other’s way, because each action space can only be used by one person in each round. Do not take your people back until all have been placed.
Your goal is to gather food for your family and to develop your farmyard board so that it is worth a lot of points.
Course of Play
Each of the 14 rounds goes through four phases, which are played one after another. The work phase is when you place your people on action spaces to take actions. Each round starts with some preparations.
1. Preparation Phase
Most action spaces are pre-printed on the game board. Each round, a new action space enters the game: draw a card from the top of the pile of action space cards and place it on the round space whose number is equal to the current round. (An overview on the back of the “Side Job” tile tells you which action space cards you can expect in each stage of the game.)
If there are goods on the round space that were placed there via certain card effects, you will now get those goods. Next, place the depicted amount of goods on each action space showing an ocher-colored arrow, even if there are goods left from previous rounds. These spaces are called “accumulation spaces”.
2. Work Phase
Beginning with the starting player (and in clockwise order), place exactly one person on an action space, until all players have placed all of their people that are in play. If an action space is occupied, you cannot use it for the rest of the round. (Each action space can only be used by one person per round.) Immediately take the action on that action space. Some action spaces provide multiple actions. You cannot use an action space without taking at least one of the available actions.
As the game progresses, some players may have more people than others. Skip players who run out of people to place and proceed with those players in clockwise order who still have people left.
Details on the Work Phase
We distinguish between permanent action spaces and accumulation spaces. Permanent action spaces provide the exact same actions every single round. Accumulation spaces accumulate goods, offering varying amounts of goods each round.
When you use an accumulation space, take all the goods from the space and place them in your supply.
Some permanent action spaces provide multiple actions that can be taken in any order (“and/or”). Other ones require you take the actions in order (“and afterward”). With the latter, you must take the first action; only then can you also take the second action.
3. Returning Home Phase
Once all people are placed, return them home to their rooms.
4. Harvest
Some rounds end with a harvest, in which you harvest your grain and vegetables, feed your family, and breed your animals.
House Building and Family Planning
At the start of the game, you have a wooden house with room for just two people. If you want to grow your family to increase the number of actions you can take each round, you must extend your house first. This requires building resources—at the start, wood and reed—which you can get on accumulation spaces like “Forest” and “Reed Bank”.
Adding Rooms
Use the “Farm Expansion” action space and take the “Build Rooms” action, paying the required building resources: 5 wood and 2 reed. Take a wood room tile and place it adjacent to your existing ones.
Details on Building a Room
- In a single action, you can build as many rooms as you can afford, one after another.
- If there is no legal space for a room on your farmyard board, you cannot add any more rooms.
Now you have more rooms than people—the prerequisite for taking the “Family Growth with Room Only” action. When taking that action, place a person from your supply next to the person with which you take the action. At the end of the round, when your people return home, place the new person in its own room: each person occupies one room. From next round, you will have an additional turn. Family growth becomes available in round 5, 6, or 7 (depending on when the “Basic Wish for Children” action space card comes into play).
Renovation
In round 5, 6, or 7, the “House Redevelopment” action space comes into play. On that space, you can take the “Renovation” action to turn your wooden house into a valuable clay house, placing a clay room tile on each of the pre-printed wood rooms in your farmyard and exchanging any additional wood rooms for clay rooms. For this, you must pay 1 reed to overhaul the roof, as well as 1 clay per room.
Later, you can renovate your house again by paying 1 reed for the roof and 1 stone per room, turning it into a stone house. (For that, you must turn the room tiles to the other side.)
Once you live in a clay house, you can only add clay rooms to your house: when you use the “Farm Expansion” action space, you must pay 5 clay and 2 reed for every new room—later 5 stone and 2 reed once you live in a stone house.
Detail on Renovation
When you renovate, you must renovate all the rooms in your house. You are not allowed to renovate only part of your house.
The Action Space Cards of the Final Rounds
Towards the end of the game, you gain a lot of momentum in growing your family. In round 12 or 13, the “Urgent Wish for Children” action space comes into play. It provides the “Family Growth Even without Room” action which allows you to grow your family without building a room first.
In the final round of the game, a second renovation space comes into play.
Detail on Family Growth
If you build a new room after taking the “Family Growth Even without Room” action, one of your people immediately moves into that room. You could not take a “Family Growth with Room Only” action right afterward, because you would not have enough room.
Animal Breeding
Animal breeding can play a major role in feeding your family. You can get animals on accumulation spaces. Take all the animals from the space when you use one.
Animal Husbandry Options
Unlike crops and building resources, you do not simply place your animals in your supply, but you must accommodate them on your farmyard board. Otherwise your animals will wander off. There are several options to counteract that.
To fence pastures, use the “Fencing” action space. Each fence that you build during the “Build Fences” action costs 1 wood. In a single action, you can fence as many pastures as you can afford. You can build your first pasture anywhere on your farmyard board—as long as the spaces are empty and contiguous. Any pasture you build after that must be adjacent to an existing one. Fences may only be built if they will create a fully enclosed pasture, with fences on all sides.
Details on Fencing
- Adjacent pastures share fences that are bordering them.
- When you take a “Build Fences” action, you may subdivide an existing pasture by adding fences inside the pasture.
- The edges of room tiles do not count as fences (even though that would make thematic sense). The same applies to field tiles.
- Once built, fences may not be demolished.
You can build stables for 2 wood per stable by taking the “Build Stables” action on the “Farm Expansion” action space.
Details on Building Stables
- You can build at most one stable in each farmyard space. The space may not be covered by a tile.
- Rooms, fields, and pastures must be adjacent to other rooms, fields, and pastures, respectively. This rule does not apply to stables.
- You do not build stables all at once, but one after another.
- Certain cards can assign a special ability to a stable. Each stable may have at most one special ability.
If you have an improvement with the symbol (see Fireplace and Cooking Hearth), you can turn the animals that you take from an accumulation space into food directly. In this case, you do not have to accommodate them on your farm first.
Anytime actions: Your animals are the only things on your farm that you can move around at any time (according to the animal husbandry rules). Everything else (rooms, fields, fences, and stables) is immovable. At any time, you can discard animals—as well as any other goods—to the general supply.
Cultivation
Cultivation requires a little bit of preparation. First, you need to take the “Plow a Field” action to acquire a field tile. You can place your first field tile anywhere on your farmyard board—as long as the space is empty. Any field tile you place after that must be adjacent to an existing one. Second, you need a seed crop. The “Grain Seeds” action space is available from the start. It provides the “Get 1 Grain” action during which you get 1 grain in your supply.
Later in the game, vegetables become available as a second crop. If you have crops in your supply and unplanted fields on your farm, you can take the “Sow” action on the appropriate action space, which comes into play between rounds 1 and 4. When you sow, place 1 grain or 1 vegetable from your supply on an empty field and add another 2 grain and 1 vegetable from the general supply on top of that, respectively (see illustration). Those crops remain in their field until the harvest. In a single “Sow” action, you can plant any number of unplanted fields.
At the start of each harvest, you will take 1 crop from each of your fields and place it in your supply (see below).
Details on Cultivation
- When you sow, you can choose from all the crops that are in your supply.
- Every seed crop that you get from a “Seeds” action space is already considered a fully-grown crop. You do not have to plant it.
- When you sow, you are not required to plant every empty field you have. Fields can lie idle.
- Once placed, you cannot remove a field tile from your farm (e.g. to make space for a room tile).
- You have no access to the crops on your fields until you harvest them, moving them to your supply (see next section). However, during the scoring at the end of the game, crops in your fields do count.
Harvest
There is a harvest at the end of rounds 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 14, indicated by the symbol on the game board. Each harvest goes through three phases that are played in order.
Field Phase
You must take exactly 1 crop from each of your fields and place it in your supply. You are not allowed to skip harvesting your fields—not even a single one of them.
Feeding Phase
Each person that is already in play requires 2 food. Exception: if you grew your family that round, the “newborn” person (who has not taken an action yet) only requires 1 food. Grain and vegetables in your supply are worth 1 food each.
If you do not have enough food to feed your family, you must go begging for food, taking 1 begging marker for each missing food. As each begging marker will cost you -3 points during scoring and as there is no way to get rid of them, you should really make sure you can feed your people.
Details on the Feeding Phase
- As you can see, additional people increase the number of actions you can take but also require food.
- You can get food on the “Fishing”, “Day Laborer”, and “Traveling Players” action spaces.
- Crops can provide a lot more food if you have and improvements, which will be addressed in the next section.
- Animals can only be turned into food via improvements. They do not provide food per se.
Breeding Phase
After you fed your family, your animals breed. If you have at least 2 animals of the same type, you get exactly one animal of that type from the general supply, but only if you can accommodate that new animal. (The parent animals are not required to live in the same space to breed.) You are explicitly forbidden to turn the parent animals or the newborn into food during the breeding phase. Each harvest, you can get at most 1 newborn animal of each type.
Major Improvements
There are 10 major improvements in the game. You have access to all of them. Once you own a major improvement, you can use it for the rest of the game. Major improvements are worth points, indicated by a number in a yellow circle.
In the top right corner of an improvement card, you can find its building cost. To play the card face up in front of you, you must pay the depicted amounts of building resources.
The main purpose of the major improvements is to turn goods into food: animals and vegetables get cooked, grain gets baked, building resources become craft products which are then exchanged for food.
Fireplaces and Cooking Hearths
There are two Fireplaces and two Cooking Hearths, among which one costs less clay than the other. They are used to turn animals and vegetables into food at any time. How much food each good is worth is noted on the card. (Cooking Hearths are slightly more efficient than Fireplaces, but also more expensive.)
Details on Fireplaces and Cooking Hearths
- When taking a “Major Improvement” action, you can exchange a Fireplace for a Cooking Hearth, without paying any additional building resources.
- All cards that allow you to turn animals and vegetables into food have a symbol at the bottom left.
At any time, you can exchange grain—and vegetables—in your supply for 1 food each, but you will get more food out of each grain if you take a “Bake Bread” action: each grain you bake turns into 2 food via a Fireplace and into 3 food via a Cooking Hearth.
Ovens
Improvements that allow you to bake bread have a symbol at the bottom right. Aside from the Fireplace and Cooking Hearth, the Clay and Stone Oven also have this symbol. When you build one of these ovens, you immediately get a “Bake Bread” action. (Preferably, you should only build an oven if you already have grain to bake.) The “Grain Utilization” action space also provides that action.
Craft Buildings
The Joinery processes wood, the Pottery clay, and the Basketmaker’s Workshop reed. Once per harvest, these improvements allow you to turn 1 wood, clay, and reed into 2, 2, and 3 food, respectively. During scoring, they allow you to exchange leftover building resources in your supply for bonus points.
Well
The tenth major improvement is the Well. For 5 rounds, it provides its owner with 1 food. When you build it, place 1 food on each of the next 5 round spaces of the game board that are not covered by an action space card yet (if possible). At the start of these rounds, you get the food from the round space.
Hand Cards
Major improvements are face up on the supply board. Minor improvements and occupations are kept in hand, until you play them, which is when the text at the bottom of the card comes into effect. As long as a card is in hand, it does not affect the game in any way.
Played cards can change the rules: the text on a card always takes precedence over this rule book.
You will not draw any additional cards during the game, so you must make the best out of the 7 minor improvements and 7 occupations you got at the start.
Detail on Hand Cards
If a card is phrased like “if some condition a/b/c is met, you get A/B/C” (see also Craft Buildings), at most one of these conditions can be met at a time: a is assigned to A, b to B, and c to C.
Minor Improvements
When you take a “Major or Minor Improvement” action, you can choose whether you build a major improvement or play a minor one. You can also play a minor improvement when taking the starting player token on the “Meeting Place” action space or when growing your family on the “Basic Wish for Children” action space.
As with the major improvements, you can find the building cost in the top right corner. However, some minor improvements may show a prerequisite: only if this prerequisite is met can you play the respective card at all. Prerequisites only demand you have something, not pay something.
Most minor and all major improvements are worth points at the end of the game. The yellow symbol on a card tells you how many points it is worth. As with the craft buildings (see page 10), some minor improvements can provide a variable number of bonus points.
Some minor improvements are traveling cards: when you play one, you carry out its instructions and pass it to the player on your left who must take it into their hand. These cards are indicated by an arrow pointing left.
Occupations
The “Lessons” action spaces allow you to play exactly one occupation card from your hand, placing it face up in front of you. On the “Lessons” action space above “Day Laborer”, the first occupation you play in the game is free. Each additional occupation you play after that costs you 1 food.
In games with 3 and 4 players, there is an additional “Lessons” action space. In a 3-player game, each occupation played on that space costs you 2 food; in a 4-player game the first two occupations cost 1 food, each one after that costs 2 food. These costs are called “occupation costs”. (There are a few occupations that require an additional cost, which is described in the text on the card.)
Starting Player
The starting player does not change automatically from round to round. To become the starting player, you must use the “Meeting Place” action space. (If no player uses it, the starting player token remains with its current holder.)
Game End and Winner
The game ends at the end of the 14th round, after the final harvest.
A table on the side of the game board shows what you get points for at the end of the game: basically anything but food.
The first line shows that 0-1 field tiles are worth 1 negative point, 2 field tiles are worth 1 point, 3 field tiles 2 points, etc. In a similar fashion, you get points for pastures, grain, vegetables, and animals.
Details on Scoring
- Whether or not goods on cards provide points depends on the particular phrasing. See the exact rules on the last pages of the appendix.
- When scoring grain and vegetables, count all the grain in your supply, on your field tiles, and on any cards that identify themselves as fields.
- Animals and people on cards that provide “room” for them do count unless stated otherwise.
You can familiarize yourself with the exact values as you are playing the game. It is important you keep in mind that you lose 1 point for each unused space in your farmyard.
Furthermore, you get points for the renovation status of your house, for your people, for the improvements in front of you, as well as for fenced stables.
A detailed description of all the scoring categories can be found on the last pages of the appendix.
The player with the most points wins. In case of a tie, the player who has more building resources left in their supply breaks the tie. If still tied, the involved players share a rank.
Number of Components
The only components that are intentionally limited in number are your five people, four stables, and 15 fences. If any other component that is available to all players runs out, use the goods tiles or improvise. There are goods tiles for 2 vegetables, 3 grain, 4 animals (one marker for each type), and 5 building resources (one marker for each type).
Solo Game
As the solo player, you start the game with 0 food. You play one turn after another, according to the 2-player game rules with the following exceptions: your adult people require 3 food in the feeding phases (newborns still only require 1 food). Only 2 wood instead of 3 are placed on the “Forest” accumulation space each round. After you play a traveling card that you would normally pass to the player on your left, remove it from play. If you like, you can choose your hand cards and even the order in which the action space cards enter play.