Harvest Valley

• Designer: Bruno Faidutti
• Publisher: Grail Games
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 8+
• Time: 15 min
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Harvest Valley is a farming game in which players are trying to build up their farms as their neighbors encroach on their land. There are also wild boars and crows intent on eating crops! Whose farm will be the most successful?  A card game that feels like a tile-laying game. On your turn, either place a card from the display into a grid, or build one of your farmhouses. But not everyone wants your farm to have the biggest harvest! On your turn, place a crop card or a farmhouse card on the shared grid. Once the grid is full, the game ends and the player with the highest score, wins.

Each player gets a Farmhouse card and a Farmhouse wooden token (2 of each in a 2p or 3p game).  The Land cards are shuffled to form a deck, and the top 3 cards are revealed to form a market.  Players leave space in the center of the table to form the Valley – a communal area where all players will play cards.  The size of the Valley is 5×5 for 2p/4p, and it is 6×5 for 3p/5p games.

On a player’s turn, they can either play a Farmhouse card to the Valley and place their wooden token on top of it OR they can choose one of the three face up cards from the market and play it to the Valley.  In either case, the card played must so that it is in an empty space which is orthogonally adjacent to a previously played card AND placed in a way that does not exceed the limits of the Valley size.  If the River is not at 3 cards, place a card from the deck in the empty space.

There are two exceptions to this.  A weeds card is played in an already occupied space, and the previously played card goes back to the river.  A tractor card is placed on an already occupied space, and the card which was previously played is pushed into an empty space which is orthogonally adjacent (and maintains the size restriction).

Play goes clockwise until the Valley Grid is full of cards. Now it’s time to resolve the game:

• The crow cancels all orthogonal/diagonal adjacent fruit trees (see the red arrows); remove them from the grid
• The Wild Board cancels all orthogonal vegetable cards (see the red arrows); remove them from the grid
• Players now score for each Vegetable on orthogonally adjacent cards to their farm (see the white arrows).  Players score for each Fruit Tree on orthogonally or diagonally adjacent cards (see white arrows).  Note that a Vegetable or Fruit Tree CARD has a +1 in value for each Pond that it is adjacent to.
• Players score for Wheat fields orthogonally adjacent to their Farmhouse; the field scores the square of the number of wheat cards in it.

The player with the most points wins. In a 2p/3p game, add up the scores from both of your farmhouses. Ties broken in favor of the player who scored the most from fruit trees.

My thoughts on the game

At 2 and 3 players, it is a delightful tile placing game (yes, I know we’re using cards).  There is a fine balance in placing cards in the right places.  You also have a challenge in figuring out when is the right time to place your Farmhouse and in what spot.  If you place it too early, your opponents can then hit your scoring cards with the Crow or Wild Boar.  But if you wait too long, you might lose the valuable spot that you want to occupy!

There is a clever back and forth here.  I especially like the interaction in the lower player count game as you get two Farmhouses to place, and this gives you more room to try to get a nice scoring situation set up.   There is one tile that can totally swing the game – the Weed tile.  If it comes up early, there’s probably only a minimal effect it can have on the game, but if it comes up near the end, it basically totally trashes the scoring of someone.  I’m not sure how I feel about this much variance due to a single tile (with no defense), but it’s definitely a Bruno type tile, and you probably already know how you feel about such things.

For what it’s worth, I’ll likely never play this game again with 4 or 5 players.  I’m really not a fan of games with opponent binding for scoring (for my own personal reasons), and I feel strongly enough about this to essentially not want to play any game like that.  See my old review of Between Two Cities which is probably still floating around the Internet somewhere for more details.  According to the designer (on BGG):  “The neighbor scoring was actually a last minute addition because just one farm didn’t feel enough with more than three players…”  Yeah, that’s still not a good reason for me – and tells me that maybe this game is really just meant for 2-3 players?  I suppose that since you know who else you’re trying to maximize the score, you’re just playing for those two farms – but I’m still not a fan of relying upon someone else in such a manner.

Once you are familiar with the base cards, there are 5 special cards which can be added to the deck (or used as replacements for similar base cards).  We haven’t yet used the Well card as the rules for it just don’t make any sense to us – there’s no way to know who scores for it?!  The other four special cards give some nice added twists to the game, and honestly, we’ve just added all those into the deck and we play with all of them.

Harvest Valley is one of the Pixel Series of games; all meant to be in a tiny box (that kind of looks like a Gameboy), and all with 8-bit-ish pixel graphics.  

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale (2p/3p)
• Neutral. John P
• Not for me…  Dale (4p/5p)