boardgaming in photos: Agricola, Love Letter, Forbidden Island

28 Nov 2020. My wife Michelle and I used to play a lot of Agricola. At the time our children were still very young. We would wait till they were asleep, and sneak to the study to play on the floor. We played swiftly. I bought the Gamer Deck expansion, which contains many Occupation and Minor Improvement cards. I still have not played with all of them. I also bought the major expansion Farmers of the Moor. We did play that a few times. Now that we were revisiting Agricola, we left out the Moor expansion first to allow us to ease back in gently. 

Despite a long time away from the game, we were still able to play quickly. We easily grasped the tempo again. In this particular game, my Minor Improvements were not very exciting, but I had a great set of Occupations. The most useful one was the Wet Nurse. When I built two new rooms at once, I immediately had two babies. For a few rounds I had 4 family members while Michelle still had only two to work with. That made a huge difference. 

I eventually expanded my home to five rooms. At this point I was still living in a wooden house, but later on I managed to upgrade to a clay house. I had hoped to upgrade to a stone house, but I didn't have enough time to do so. Michelle managed that and scored handsomely for her stone house. 

These in the top row were my Occupations. The first one, the Tutor, gave me 1VP per subsequently played Occupation. Since I had many good Occupations, having him was a godsend. I had planned to play many Occupations anyhow, so playing him first was a great bonus. At the rightmost, the Field Watchman and the Sower helped me with growing grain and growing vegetables respectively. Because of them, I fared well in both areas. 

29 Nov 2020. Even when Love Letter was all the rage, I didn't intend to try it, because how much fun could a tiny 16-card game be? It was because of this lovely fan-made Adventure Time version that I downloaded the files and made my own copy to play. I promptly fell in love with the game. I am thankful that I did not miss this work of genius. 

I did 4-player games with my family. My children are familiar with the game but Michelle is not very familiar with it. Sometimes elder daughter Shee Yun would deduce that someone was likely holding a certain card, and she would get it right, and Michelle would be flabbergasted. I teased Shee Yun for being Sherlock, and then said to Michelle, "It's elementary, Watson", before explaining how Shee Yun worked that out. 

Finn and Jake are best friends. You can use Jake to peek at the card of an opponent, and then on your next turn use Finn to guess his card and thus eliminate him. Technically you are no longer guessing because you've already seen his card. Your opponent will be forced to hurriedly play whatever card he is holding, because if he doesn't you will eliminate him next turn. 

Getting the Princess card early is bad. You can't play her because that eliminates you. So you will be forced to play whatever other card you draw on your turn. You don't have a choice. The Princess is only good if you get her near the end of the round, because it is the highest valued card. In this particular round, I drew both the LSP cards. LSP protects you from all attacks, until the start of your next turn. It was handy having LSP protecting my Princess. With 4 players, two turns would already be half a game round. 

I always play to 3 points, regardless of the number of players. I think playing longer than that makes the game outstay its welcome. Normally with 4 players you play to 4 points. With fewer than four, you need to score even more points to win. In this particular game, all four of us reached 2 points! The next game round would be the grand finale. That was exciting! 

Later on we had one game when Chen Rui won three game rounds straight without anyone else scoring a single point. That was the other extreme. 

In one particular game round Michelle played four Finns! As we played, we developed one theory. If a person plays Finn early, his other card is likely also Finn. It is not a good idea to play Finn early because there is little information available. So a person wouldn't want to play Finn unless he has no choice, e.g. both his cards being Finns. It is also possible his other card is Princess Bubblegum, which he can't play.  

Forbidden Island. Younger daughter Chen Rui remembers this as being a stressful and difficult game. We played with three players - Chen Rui, Michelle and I. We played at normal difficulty level. It turned out to be easier than she expected and we won without too much trouble. 

Location tiles showing the monochrome blue side are flooded. If they get flooded again they will disappear forever - removed from the game. When in the flooded state, it is still possible to save them. Just perform the shore-up action to flip them back to the dry side (multi-coloured). 

Sunk tiles sometimes break the island up and thus disconnect paths. When this happens, you will be forced to rely on special action cards or special abilities to move across the straits. It doesn't necessarily doom you, but it will make life more difficult. In our game, the helipad was at the top left, and we did our best to prevent it from getting cut off. Once we retrieved all four treasures we would need to head in that direction, get on the helicopter, and get off the island.  

Location tiles on the edges and out of the way may not seem important, but it is still useful to save them and keep the island intact as long as possible. This buys you time somewhat.   

We played a second game, this time at hard difficulty level. Things didn't go so well this time. The timing of our card draw was poor. We were forced to sacrifice green cards so that we could collect enough cards of another colour to retrieve the treasure of that colour, before we returned to collect green cards again. It took too much time and we couldn't get that last treasure before the whole island disappeared beneath the waves, sending us all to the bottom of the ocean.