Harvest 

• Designer: Trey Chambers
• Publisher: Keymaster Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30-60 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3BIdQ5K  
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Salutations, neighbor, and welcome to Furroughfield, the Commonwealth of Free Beasts! Ours is a budding farm town with soil ripe for planting.

In Harvest, you take on the role of a farmer, each with their own unique penchant for working the land, and choose a farmhouse with its own special round-to-round benefit. Each round, you draft sunrise cards that give you a one-time income and determine turn order for the round. Following that turn order, move your wheelbarrows around town to gather resources that you’ll use to manage your fields. Plant seeds, tend the land, and harvest crops to make money and score points. Clear land to expand your farm, and construct buildings that make your land more efficient and give you endgame bonuses. By the end of harvest season, the farmer with the most points wins!

To set up the game, place the main board on table, placing seed/crop tiles in the General store, building tiles in the Workshop, stacks of 3 action tiles in the Farmer’s Market.  Each player gets their 3 wheelbarrows and their own Farm board and covers the field areas with 6 facedown building tiles.  The Bucket token is placed on the 3 space of the water track and the water drop on the 1 space. On the other side, the Fertilizer token starts on the 1 space.  Each player gets two Characters and two Farmhouse Tiles; choosing one of each to start the game with.  Finally, each player draws a random Sunrise Tile to determine turn order. The game is played over four rounds, each with a Sunrise Phase, Action Phase and Sunset Phase.

In the Sunrise Phase, three Sunrise tiles are drawn from the deck and placed face up on the table.   Starting with the player with the lowest numbered Sunrise tile, a new Sunrise tile will be chosen from the display of three tiles, and then that player will take any Sunrise actions available to them (from the Sunrise tile, their Farmhouse tile or anywhere else in their play area or from their Character).  The process is repeated with all the other players continuing in low to high order based on their previous Sunrise tile.  At the end of the phase, return the Sunrise tiles and shuffle everything to make a new deck for the next round.

In the Action phase, players take turns to place a Wheelbarrow on an available action space on the board and then take the associated action.  Examples of the actions are:

•         General Store: Depending on the space, take 1 to 3 actions (all different): Gain a Fertilizer OR move your water drop up to your water bucket OR purchase seeds at the cost printed on the board

•         Fields: Depending on the space, take 1 to 3 actions (all different): Plant as many seeds as you can/want (paying the fertilizer cost as needed), OR tend your crops by placing a matching crop on your board so that it is orthogonally adjacent to its “parent” (paying water as indicated), OR Harvest by removing all crops from your field gaining points and fertilizer for each.
•         Workshop: Depending on the space, take 1 to 3 actions (all different): spend a coin to upgrade your bucket capacity by 1 OR spend 2 coins to clear a Building tile from your board and place that tile into the Workshop OR Build a building by paying the cost shown on a Building tile in the Workshop and placing it Building side up into your Field spaces – some buildings offer a “when built” effect that is resolved now.

•         Farmer’s Market: Choose an available space on an action tile, pay the cost if any, then take the actions shown on that space.
•         Trading Post: Spend 1 seed / 2 poop / 3 water to do one of the following: Clear land, any Field action or upgrade a seed to the next highest type.

When all players have placed all their wheelbarrows, the game moves into the Sunset Phase which is mostly upkeep.  All players take their wheelbarrows back.  All the buildings in the Workshop are shifted down a row (anything still in the bottom row is discarded). The tiles in the Farmer’s Market are discarded, revealing new tiles. Move the Round Marker forward one space.  The next round starts with a Sunrise Phase, again started by the player with the lowest current Sunrise tile.

At the end of the fourth round, you can skip the Sunset Phase and move into final scoring. 

•         All players resolve any buildings with End Game scoring conditions
•         1 point per unharvested Crop still in their Fields
•         2 points per blueberry bush in their Field
•         1 point for every two leftover coins 

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most leftover resources.

My thoughts on the game

Harvest is a great midlevel worker placement game that feels a bit friendlier than most.  As with all worker placement games, there is a bit of competition for the right space – that is, if you want to do something, you need to put your wheelbarrow in the space first to get the action.  The General Store, Fields and Workshop each provide the main actions in the game, so the challenge for the players is trying to prioritize which of these areas they want to get the most actions in.

The nice part of Harvest is that there are usually multiple ways to get something done.   To start, most of the areas do not correspond to a specific action but rather to the number of actions you can do from the menu for that location. Additionally, the action icons found on the tiles in the Farmer’s Market as well as the free-for-all in the Trading Post provide other possible locations for most actions.

So here, the challenge is not to fight for the specific action but rather to figure out how to be the most efficient with your three Wheelbarrow options each turn.  You’ll definitely get to do a lot of things, and most of the things you want to do, but the real question is how many of those things will you be able to do.   Sure, there is a bit of timing going on – that is, you have to clear fields first to then plant things before you can tend them into more things and then harvest them for points – but again, there are many ways to get those actions, so in general, doing more things will lead to more points.

Each game should play out a little differently given the combination of Character ability and Farmhouse tile Sunrise ability.  These actions will definitely give you certain advantages, and you’ll likely want to craft your strategy to leverage these advantages as much as possible.

The artwork is adorable and cute-sy.  The art direction has a fairly retro feel to it, and it is a very pretty package on the table.  The iconography is intuitive, and if there are any questions, everything is nearly summarized on the back cover of the rules.  Speaking of the rules, they are laid out well, and there are some illustrations to help you figure things out – they are quite good showing the effects of the actions that you could take.  The only quirky thing that I couldn’t figure out is why the tractor that is supposed to mark the rounds is so much larger than the spaces where you want to put it.   Seriously, just give me a cube if you can’t make the bit fit.

Harvest would be a really good choice for a light game or perhaps as an introduction to worker placement as it is more forgiving than most given the multiple ways one can take a particular action. Sure, you won’t have the same tension that you would get in Caylus, but your strategy also won’t fall apart because you weren’t able to get the single worker space you needed in order to do your thing.  I’d be happy to play this whenever it was suggested, and I would recommend it for the right crowd.

 Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3BIdQ5K  

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me…