Agricola: Farmers of the Moor

I love Agricola and I didn't expect there to be a lot of ways to make it better, but I love this expansion. The requirement to heat your house with fuel adds some compelling challenges, and you have to cut peat (for fuel) from some farm spaces before you can use them. If you don't have enough fuel, family members can get "sick" and lose a turn, but at the end of the round they return with a small reward to mitigate the lost action. The horses don't do much for me, but the special actions are the best part of the expansion because they really change the predictability of what the starting player will do. It can be a really tough decision to take a special action instead of the best action space on the board. There are extra major improvements, which is a great addition for variability if you don't like how fast the major improvements can be taken in the base game. And of course, a whole bunch of new minor improvements to explore different combinations with the base game cards, which is what gives Agricola so much replay value. It's always fun when you can use a card that's usually worthless and make a great combo.

Agricola is one of my all time favorite games. I will play it anytime, anywhere. I played it dozens of times, and thought it was about as good as it could get, and then I played it with this expansion. Wow. It fixed problems I never even knew the game had. It makes an already great game even better. Suddenly there are viable reasons to renovate your house early. Horses provide a new source of points. Most interestingly are the new action cards. On your turn, instead of placing a worker, you can take an action card that give access to new actions. The new actions are less powerful than the worker actions, but they are actions you take in addition to worker actions. The catch is that you have to have workers left to be able to take an action card. It creates a really clever debate on whats more important. All in all, I love this expansion, and its great to see that its available for the new edition of the game.