Agricola

In MY GAME, you are a farmer in a wooden shack with your spouse and little else. In a turn, you only have to do two actions, one for yourself and one for the spouse, out of all the possibilities you'll find on a farm: collect clay, wood or stone; build fences; and so on. You might think about having children so you can do more work, but first you have to enlarge your house. And what are you going to feed all the little rugrats with? The game supports many levels of complexity, mainly through the use (or non-use) of two of its main card types, Minor Improvements and Occupations. In the beginner version (called Family Variant in the US version), these cards are not used at all. For advanced play, the US version includes three levels of both card types: Basic (E deck), Interactive (I deck) and Complex (K deck), and the rulebook encourages players to experiment with the different decks and their mixes. There are also spare decks such as Deck Z and Deck L.MYGAME is a turn-based game. There are 14 rounds of play that take place in 6 stages, with a harvest at the end of each stage (after rounds 4, 7, 9, 11, 13 and 14).Each player starts with two game pieces (farmer and spouse) and can therefore take two turns, or actions, per round. There are multiple options, and as the game progresses, you'll have more and more: the first thing you do in a round is flip a new action card.Problem: Each action can be taken by only one player each round, so it's important to do some things with high preference.Each player also starts with a hand of 7 Occupation cards (out of 160+ total) and 7 Minor Improvements cards (out of 140+ total) that they can use during the game if they fit their strategy. Speaking of which, there are countless strategies, some depending on your hand of cards. Sometimes it's a good option to stay the course, and sometimes it's better to react to your opponents' actions.