Cold Comfort Farms

To be fair to Andrew, he didn't actually want to play games tonight. I plied him with the promise of crisps and beer. In a ghoulish case of life imitating art, or more specifically life imitating our recently-created script, I had to pay a friend to play games (in crisps and beer).

However Andrew's initial pallor brightened when I arrived with Agricola in the car. I also had Railways of the World and Sutter's Mill, but as soon as I mentioned Uwe Rosenberg's classic, Andrew's eyes lit up. "We have to get you back on board with that game" he said.

this Farmer is royalty-free

I thought Andrew had played recently, but no: that's been mostly Adam and Gonz. So neither of us remembered all the rules, and it soon became apparent we didn't have a clue what we were doing. Of course Agricola is accessible from the get-go in terms of options, but when it came to strategy, well; we were both wandering around our farms, staring disconsolately at piles of wheat, ploughing fields that lay fallow and fencing pastures that lay empty, and in the unlikely event a sheep made it to lambing season you could bet your last bit of fence it'd be into the pot on the next round. Andrew charitably let me take one begging card when I should have taken two for the first harvest, as I didn't realise your family needed two food each, not one.

The score-pad showed when we'd last played a two-player - probably about two years ago - Andrew had beaten me 38 to 36 points. This time I beat him by 18 to 9. Although Andrew had built a large stone house he had quite a few empty spaces on his farm, whereas mine at least had some cattle milling about on them, surprisingly giving birth.

It was a shocking performance really, but in fairness we've both been out of this agricultural loop for some time... and although I enjoyed it, it didn't convince me I wanted to rush back to a lengthy 3 or 4-player experience. It's a lovely game, but I'd rather play Railways to be honest. I'm not sure why that is.

Much less imposing on this (lightweight) gamer's eye was Biblios, which we rounded off with. Halfway through Andrew was confident, and I less so. But as he used up his gold devaluing my objective dice, I junked lots of colour to pick up the gold in the auction phase and grab the available remaining colour cards:

Sam 9
Andrew 4

I departed a little after 9pm, glad to have refreshed my memory on Agricola, but also reminded of the stress of the game. It's like Year of the Dragon set in the Cotswolds.