Farm Hand

• Designer:  Craig Somerton
• Publisher: Grail Games
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 10+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: 
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

The animals on your farm are having a contest to see which one is the loudest! Who do you think will win? Cover your ears, as sometimes the animals will be so loud they will even scare each other away! Farm Hand is a unique trick-taking game of prediction and detection! Players will know what suits the cards in their opponents’ hands are, but not their values. Do your best to predict how many tricks you will win, while preventing your opponents from doing the same!

Farm Hand is a fun and engaging 21-card micro game for 1-5 players in 15-20 mins. A game that neatly fits in your pocket or purse and can be played almost anywhere. Gameplay includes trick-taking, publicly visible suits, and simultaneous bidding.

The game has 6 asymmetric suits ranging from 1 card through to 6 cards, with values 1-7 spread across the suits. The player aid nicely reminds you what ranks are available in each of the suits.  The possible ranks are also seen on the backs of each card.  There are three cards of each rank in the deck.

Played across 6 rounds, each round players are dealt a hand that increases by 1 card (1x card in round 1, 2x cards in round 2, etc.)

With all suits openly visible to all players, everyone must try to predict how many tricks they will win in the round – they bid simultaneously by revealing a number of fingers.

The bids are recorded and the trick-taking phase commences.

Everyone plays their cards using standard must-follow trick-taking rules, however, the highest card wins the trick, regardless of suit. BUT… if cards of the same number are played, they cancel each other out and the next highest card wins the trick. This often leads to surprise outcomes and plenty of laughs and groans.

Points are awarded based on whether players correctly predicted their bids or not:

• If your Bid and Tricks match EXACTLY, score points equal to the Current Round
• If your Bid and Tricks DO NOT MATCH, score -1 point per Difference

The dealer moves clockwise. Gather all the cards, shuffle and deal again.  Play 6 rounds. The winner is the player with the highest score.

My thoughts on the game

Farm Hand is a quick trick taking game – only playing six hands with some being as small as a single trick.  Your goal in the game is to try to predict the outcome of a truly unpredictable hand.  You are given a fair amount of information – you know all the cards in your own hand as well as the suits in the hands of all of your opponents.  You can use a bit of logical reasoning to guess at what ranks are held by the other players based on both the distribution of numbers in each suit, memory of what cards had been previously played this han d, and taking into account the bid of each player.

At the start of each hand, you have to try to process all thie information (as well as your place in initial turn order) to predict the number of tricks you will win.  The round of the game will also affect your bid – as the number of cards in play in total each round changes, and this will affect how you think your cards will fare. If you have a full hand, you may have a bit of leeway on what to play.  In the first few hands, you might not have any decision making at all based on the must follow rules.

The outcome of the trick is often unpredictable given the Raj mechanic of eliminating cards of matching ranks.  Plenty of times, a seemingly safe play ends up unexpectedly winning a trick when cards get canceled out of a trick.

At higher player counts, the game is more chaotic for me – as there are more cards in play each trick and a higher probabilty of matching cards.  The match could come from a player simply being forced to follow suit.  The match could also come from a player deciding to actively play a card to match in order to create an unexpected result.  With more players, there is simply more opportunity for this to happen.  

At the full count of five players, expect more unexpected things :).  At the other end, a three player game gives you the feeling of slightly more control.  Either way, it is this unpredictablility that makes the game.  It would honestly be a dull game without these twists and turns.  

The scoring rules definitely reward making a bid in the final two rounds (positive 5 or 6 points), though this cuts both ways.  Players in the lead (or just unliked players) could possibly be targeted somewhat as other players could try to engineer a situation to make those players miss their bid.

The description from the publisher calls this a micro-game, and I’ll nitpick a bit here.  While the game components are just 21 cards, the box is too big to fit in your pocket and there are scores of chits used in the game.    I think with some small modifications (a single shared player aid card, and a piece of paper to replace the scoring tokens and bid cards), you could get this down to about 25 cards – and then it would truly be a micro-game.  But, the overall package is definitely still quite compact, and I can understand why Grail Games used a box that matches the rest of the small game line.

Regardless of the size, there is definitely a an interesting card game contained in the box.  As mentioned earlier, it definitely plays differently based on player count, and I think that which end of the spectrum is preferable will be up to the eye of the beholder.

This is one of three small games that I received from Grail Games, and I do like the combination of small box footprint to the size of the game contained within. 

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

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