Formidable Farm

• Designer: Friedemann Friese
• Publisher: 2F
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30-45 min
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In Formidable Farm, you tirelessly try to fulfill the wishes of the village population for field crops.  At the start of the market day, you set the number of trades you need to fulfill until the evening. Initially, you do not know the details of the village population’s wishes, and you can only work through the trades one after the other.

The village population follows simple rules for all their wishes: If you supply the needed field crops, you will get a reward. If a customer wants tomatoes, they give you two bags of wheat. If you organize a hoped-for sheep, the customer trades your surplus cucumbers for pigs. For two cucumbers and a bag of wheat, you immediately get details for another three wishes.  If you have delivery problems, you can make additional trades at the market to get needed rewards. You also can use each of your fulfilled trade cards to pay for advantages.

If you are the first to fulfill the wishes of the village population, you win Formidable Farm and enjoy an early end of the work day.

The supply board is placed on the table and all the crops in the supply.  The 119 trade cards are shuffled and then each player is dealt a face-down stack of them (number varies based on player count). Each player draws the top 3 cards from their personal stack into their hand.  The remaining trade card deck is placed on the table and the top 5 cards are revealed to form a market.   On their first turn, each player will place their player disc on an empty space of the supply board.

On the front of each trade card, you will see a desire at the top and the reward for fulfilling that desire on the bottom.  Note that while you are obligated to pay all the costs for a trade card, you are not obligated to take the rewards.  When completed, the card is placed on the table near you, and the back of the card shows a coin for being a fulfilled trade.  

On your turn, you can do a couple of things, in any order you like: get supplies, fulfill up to 3 trade cards, pay for a “rule-breaker” ability.  The game continues until at least one player has fulfilled their entire personal stack of trade cards.

When you get supplies, you will move your disc on the supply board to any empty space. You gain the crops or cards as shown on the space you land on.

When you fulfill trade cards, you must pay all the costs shown and then optionally take the reward.  You are able to fulfill any of the cards in your hand as well as any of the face-up trade cards in the display.  If you are told to draw a card as a reward but have none left to draw, you can take a crop for each card not drawn.   While the goal of the game is to fulfill all your personal cards, you may gain some benefit from the rewards of the public market trades – such as gaining resources you need or being able to draw more of your own trade cards into your hand.

There are also four “rule-breakers” that you can pay for on your turn.  You must use the coins on your previously fulfilled trade cards to pay for these abilities.

• Stay on the same space of the supply board (2)
• Move onto an occupied space (1 per disc already there)
• Take an additional field crop from your chosen space (3)
• Draw an additional trade card into your hand (3)

Cards spent this way leave your personal area and are placed in the general discard pile.

When you are done with all your actions, you place all fulfilled trade cards from this turn into your supply – that is, you cannot use the coin from a trade card on the same turn that you complete it.  Also, replenish the trade card market to 5 if you fulfilled any during your turn.

The game continues until the end of a round where at least one player has completed all of their trade cards.  If only one player has done so, that player wins.  If multiple players have finished their stack, they score their remaining crops: 1pt per wheat, 2pt for cucumber/tomato, 3pt for sheep/pig.  The player with the most points wins.

My thoughts on the game

I have played this a few times now, both in prototype form and then the final production, and this is an interesting take on the order fulfillment game.  The main challenge is to get through your own stack of randomly dealt orders, but you can also take care of the public orders if they give you a benefit that you need.

The catch, at least for me, is figuring out when I need to do one of the public orders – I am always enticed by doing one if I have the right ingredients, but they really need to help me get closer to my overall goal in order to be worth the time and effort to do them.  That being said – sometimes there is enough value in simply completing a contract in order to get another coin to spend on the special actions.

Those special actions are quite important in Formidable Farm.  As it is a race to complete the stack of orders, anything that helps you be more efficient will cause you to take fewer actions and thus hopefully get through your stack faster.  All four of the special actions can be quite powerful at the right time; it’s just a matter of knowing when to activate them.

Some folks have grumbled that the game might have a rich get richer syndrome, as the player who first gets a lot of coins will then have access to special actions that will allow them to fulfill future orders faster… but I don’t agree.  As the coins must be spent to use the special actions, there is no ongoing advantage.  Other players will get the same advantages as soon as they fulfill enough contracts, and it should all even out over the course of the game.  

The game keeps me constantly engaged as I’m always looking at the market, my current inventory, my hand of contracts and the public contracts to try to figure out what I need to do on each turn.  At some point, I might even be comfortable enough to keep an eye out on the next player and consider trying to deny them resources or public contracts… but for now, there’s enough going on that I just keep my head down and worry about my own things.

This is the sort of game I enjoy with each turn being its own little puzzle.  Sure, there’s not much of an arc here because you’re not really building much of an engine, you’re just churning through the orders as quickly as you can.  But for a 30 minute super filler, it works just fine.   Our group plays games quickly, and as a result, it never overstays its welcome.  Formidable Farm has been fantastic fun thus far.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Dan B. (2 plays): I like the puzzly aspect of figuring out how to chain my cards efficiently. I agree with Dale that completing cards early is not necessarily an advantage. However, the randomness of the contract stacks bothers me somewhat – one player’s cards might be much easier than another’s, or simply might mesh better. It’s also not very interactive – you can complete public contracts someone else might want, or use the supplies space they will want so they have to pay a coin to use it, but since you can’t see anyone else’s cards any interaction is basically random.

Joe Huber (3 plays): I agree with Dan.  I want to like the game – the puzzles are interesting puzzles – but how one does depends upon what cards one was dealt, the order in your stack (though at least there are ways to deal with that), and the public contracts available on your turn.  All of which makes it a game I’m happy to play more than one I will seek out plays of.

Simon Weinberg – 1 play: I started off really liking this as I solved the puzzles to get rid of more cards but it became repetitive during the game and by the end I was disenchanted. Having said that, there are plenty of worker placement games which don’t do much more than this resource churning and take much longer to play. So some will like its compressed nature; shame it lacks a game arc. 

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale 
• Neutral. Dan B., Joe, Simon W
• Not for me…Alan H