Designers: Daniel Dranove and Tom Weiner
Artist: Michael Zhang
Publisher: Medium Brow Games
Players: 2-4 (5th player in the deluxe edition)
Playtime: 30 minutes per player
Do you have friends who like Catan and Risk who you want to get into more modern board games? If so, Farms Race might be a good game to check out, as it is a Reese’s peanut butter cup of area control and lobbing nukes from Catanish hexes. Their tagline is ‘A parody of Eurogames with communist farm animals and nukes.’
Farms Race is not trying to be something it is not. It is a game for smashmouth gamers who want to go after each other and push every advantage to win, while talking smack when it is not your turn.
It is a race to 10 points, so the name is accurate. The Farm theme works well as an opening gambit. There are people on the board and you play different animals (chickens, sheep, pigs, and cows – rabbits are the 5th animal in the deluxe version) who have gained sentience due to a local nuclear power plant ‘incident’. Paralleling Animal Farm by George Orwell, you want power, so you start by eradicating the people who populate the board and then go after the other animals.
Points are earned by building barns (1 VP), armories (upgraded barns – 2 VP), possessing the Nukiest token (1 VP), obtaining face-down spy cards (1 VP each), and taking over an opponent’s region that is not in turmoil (1 VP). Four of these five are easy to explain to any Catan player (town, city, longest road, and cards with VPs). The fifth is the area control element that we’ll get to in a bit. All points are open other than spy cards, so you can guess who is in the lead without really knowing it.
The board has numerous possible configurations, but they are made of hex tiles with one of five environments, wood, brick, wheat, weapons, and plutonium. Strangely enough, there is an even distribution of hexes, so plenty of plutonium for everyone. Some boards have all the hexes together to make a map while others have gaps that make it into a lattice structure. For this review, assume a Catan-like board without roads and numbers on the hexes. There is player variability in the setup through the drafting of mutation cards. These break the rules in a variety of ways and are distributed by snake drafting them, starting with the first player.
Turns and Preparation
Each player’s turn is four steps, Prepare, Act, Produce, and Discard. Prepare means you remove turmoil tokens from the spaces you control and you get to add an animal (troop) at each of your buildings (barns & armories). This creates an incentive to build buildings towards the center of the board where they are spawned closer to where they are needed.
Building
Building can be done at any point after Preparation and before the end of the turn. Building is done by spending resources generated during the Produce part of the turn, so if you build before producing this turn you are using existing cards. Barns (1 wheat, 1 wood, 1 brick, and 1 plutonium – don’t ask – I don’t know), Armory (upgrade from a barn for 3 weapons and 2 plutonium), Spy Cards (one wheat and one wood), and Nukes (1 brick, 1 weapon, and 1 plutonium). Barns and Armories are buildings that create new places to spawn animals. Armories additionally grant one additional damage per Armory each time you roll in combat, regardless of where the combat occurs, and are worth 2 VP instead of 1 VP for barns. There is no reason to build barns before moving animals, but building an armory at the start of your turn can help your combat later that turn. Spy cards do all the usual tricks and some are worth a VP.
Photo by vexpac
Nukes are built and then can be used at any time. They are launched from a hex you control and hit an adjacent hex, causing 1 damage to everything in that hex. In true Dr. Strangelove fashion, opponents who have been hit with nukes have an instant chance to retaliate by both spending resources to build nukes and launching them. The only restrictions on strike-back are that they cannot trade for the resources to build the nukes, they have to have them. Oh, and they can hit other players with their nukes and those players then gain strike-back. Humans only have 1 hit point, so they die immediately, but animals can survive if they are not already injured. The Nukiest Award and the 1 VP that goes with it go to the first person to build a Nuke, then goes to another player if they possess more used and unused Nukes than the current holder.
Animal Movement and Resource Generation
After the preparation phase, for each animal token, you can either move it one space or heal it. Since each animal has 2 hit points, you can fully heal an animal that was hit once, instead of moving it. Movement can lead to conflict when a token is moved into a hex controlled by another player. Conflict is different from Nukes. You cannot take over a hex with Nukes. It just damages/kills tokens and has no effect on buildings, strangely enough.
You can move several animals at the same time into an area with a human or an opponent’s animals or buildings, leading to a conflict. Humans are tokens that have a 1, 2 or 3 on the back. This represents how many humans there are on that space. When you enter a space with a human and choose how many of you animals you will use to attack them, then the token is flipped. If you don’t attack them, they don’t attack you. In addition, a player may not attack a hex more than once on a turn, so if you move into a hex with an opponent’s animals and a human token, you have to choose which one to attack that turn.
In a combat between 2 animals and 3 humans, the attacker rolls 2 special six-sided dice – they have three different sides, blank, gun, and hat. Blank is a miss. A hat is a hit against humans, but not against animals. A gun is a hit against humans and animals.
Humans never retreat, but animals can. If an area is taken over by eliminating all the opposing pieces on that hex, the player has taken it over from an opponent, not just humans, they gain a VP. There are detailed rules for retreating which force the attacker to go back to the hex they came from and permit the defender to retreat to an adjacent hex they control. When you take over a hex from another player, their buildings are destroyed along with the VPs gained from those buildings. When a hex is taken over from another player, a turmoil token is added to prevent other players from beating up on the player who just took over the hex, thereby farming VPs off each other.
From the rules, “If a player loses all their buildings andbherds, they are eliminated from the game and are in charge ofbsnacks and drinks until the game ends (“Sorry, it’s in the rules!”).”
Resources are cards and are generated by rolling a pair of resource dice. Each six-sided die has one of the five resources on five faces and a question mark on the sixth. You roll the dice and get a resource card of that type for each hex of that type that you control, so controlling 2 wheat fields means two wheat cards each time wheat is rolled. Question mark means the active player chooses a resource and everyone generates as many of that resource as hexes they control.
The final step in your turn is discarding down to seven or fewer resources, which you can achieve by discarding cards or by converting them 3-to-1. There is no limit on Spy Cards, just resource cards.
Trading Resources
You did not think we would get through this review without mentioning trading, did you?
The active player can always trade three of one resource for one of another.
The non-active players can trade at any time for anything, with future promises explicitly not being binding.
Spy cards, VPs, Nukiest Award, Buildings, and Animals cannot be traded.
Thoughts
This is a good beer-and-pretzels game for those seeking a highly interactive game with direct conflict. It can lead to beating up the weakest player, but that is somewhat mitigated by the turmoil tokens. The games we played only had someone eliminated soon before the game ended, so that is less of a concern than it might seem.
The art and pieces are nice and functional with enough bling and substance to make it a nice gift for the person who has aggression issues and wants to take them out on their friends. For others, if you don’t know if this game is for you yet, I’m not sure what to say.
