Agricola!

It's here at last! For those of you that haven't heard of Agricola, it caused a storm at last years Essen but the English language version by Z-man games has only just been released.

Agricola is a boardgame for 1-5 people where you control a little wooden farmer and his little wooden wife. Each of the aforementioned folk are represented by a token and can take one action each per round. With these actions you can collect supplies and try to extend your two room wooden hut or you can have some little wooden token babies so they can help you with the workload once they grow up. Of course that requires more food to feed your family. And speaking of food there are several ways to get it, you can choose to plow fields and plant seeds or fence in pasture for animals to graze on. And in a harvest turn you can reap the rewards of your crops and breed your animals. But once that's done you need to start all over again so you have something to harvest next time round!

Victory points are earned for different things but a diverse and pleasant settlement at the end of the game is a good goal. There are 14 turns in total, each with a lot of resource management to consider.

Agricola is currently ranked 8.08/10 on www.boardgamegeek.com and is the 4th highest ranked board game on the entire site! (It's only Puerto Rico, Power Grid and Twilight Struggle that beat it).