For many board game enthusiasts, Uwe Rosenberg’s Agricola (published in the US by Z-Man Games) was the top game released in 2008, if not of all time; currently it is the Number One rated game on BoardGameGeek.com. Agricola offers several levels of play that accommodate from one to five players, including a basic Family Game that doesn’t use any additional cards, but the central mechanics remain consistent across all variations.

At its core, Agricola is a worker-placement game that offers an increasing number of options during each of its fourteen rounds of play; those fourteen rounds are divided into six “stages”, with specific subsets of options appearing consistently at some point in a specific stage. Each player begins with a mostly-empty farm board containing a two-room wooden house and a pair of farmers, plus some food in their supply. Everything else must be acquired by using one of your farmers on one of the available actions.

The board contains several base actions that are available from the outset; there are more options for more players. Each round, an additional option is placed on the board. Players place one of their farmers on an unclaimed action, performing it as they do so. These actions include acquiring materials and goods for their supply, using those materials for various improvements (including planting crops), or even adding a new member to a player’s family for additional actions in future rounds. However, additional bodies also have additional mouths. At the end of each stage there is a Harvest, at which point crops are harvested, livestock potentially reproduce, and each member of your family must be fed two food or else you lose three points for each food you are short. This is an incredibly stiff penalty, so the first priority of most skilled players is to establish some sort of “food engine”.

After the final harvest, scores are tallied. Most categories score from one to four points based on how much of that category you possess, and most carry a one-point penalty for not having any. With a set cap on points in each category (not to mention the penalty for neglecting one), it pays to diversify. Additional points are earned for upgrading your house from wood to clay or stone, family members, and other miscellaneous sources; finally, be aware that you are also penalized a point per empty space on your farm board.

Beyond the Family Game, Agricola offers three different decks of cards that include both Minor Improvements and Occupations (some occupations aren’t used with fewer players). The decks are labeled “E”asy, “I”nteractive, and “K”omplex (from the original German) and can be combined for additional play if desired. Each player is dealt seven cards of each type at the start of the game and there is no way to receive more. Minor improvements are typically played as bonuses to other actions; Occupations must be played as their own action and will cost you food to play (except for your first, depending on the action space used) but are often quite powerful.

Agricola offers deep strategy (including a fun but brutal solitaire variant) for those who are able to overcome its two main obstacles. The first is an overwhelming sense of complexity; your first few sessions will consume several hours as you come to grips with the wealth of options at your disposal, especially if you forego the stripped-down Family Game and jump right into one of the decks. Even without the cards there is still a ton of wooden bits moving all over the place. Secondly, the game itself usually retails for $70, which is much more than most European-style board games; all of the various cards and bits don’t come cheap, and the surprising heft of the box on the shelf should reassure you that you are definitely getting your $70’s worth, but the “sticker shock” is still there. Fortunately, you don’t need to actually own the game in order to play it, so try it out first if you can.  

If any game were to be nicknamed “Tetris: the Board Game” (other than the actual Tetris board game… both of them), FITS would be at the front of the line and elbowing competitors like Blokus out of the way.  FITS — which stands for “Fill In The Spaces” — is a Reiner Knizia design and published by Ravensburger, supporting one to four players.

Each player gets a ramp that holds a board and a plastic slide. Each board has a dozen lines of six dots each, with some boards containing additional symbols used for scoring purposes. Along with the ramp comes an assortment of blocks, from three to five blocks in size. A card representing each block is also included, as well as four special “start block” cards.

Play is quick and simple. Each player randomly takes one of the start cards and slides that block on to his ramp. Then a card is turned up and every player places that block; when your start block’s card comes up you simply don’t place a block on that occasion. This repeats until the deck is exhausted, although most players will probably fill up their ramp long before that happens (blocks can be placed above the dots, but may not breach the side walls). Blocks must “drop” straight down, and cannot shift into awkward spaces or rotate after you decide where they’re going; in other words, once you miss the opportunity to fill in a space, you can never correct that mistake. This is unfortunate, as every unfilled space will cost you a point at the end of the round. 

While the point-per-dot penalty applies to all rounds of play, each round has its own unique way to gain points. Round One simply awards you one point for each fully-filled line; this is the warm-up, and it’s more difficult than you might think. Round Two features specific dots that are worth one, two, or three points if they are uncovered at the end of the round; Round Three is similar but also contains five-point penalty dots that you definitely want to cover up ASAP. Finally, Round Four challenges you with five pairs of symbols; each pair of symbols left uncovered is worth three points… and each partially-uncovered pair (that is, every unpaired symbol) is a three-point penalty. Yeah… that’s as evil as it sounds, believe me. Negative scores happen (in each round) and are surprisingly common.

FITS is really a solitaire game at heart; even with multiple players it’s really just several solitaire games comparing scores against each other. The only difference is the start piece of each player and the decisions that must be made as the ramps fill up. That being said, there’s a strange sort of amusement that comes when the next piece is perfect for your ramp but hellish for everyone else’s. This can also be a source of “analysis paralysis,” as players try to minimize the damage they’re about to inflict on themselves, but other than that a single game should be done in about 30 minuets, tops. FITS may never be the main event at game night, but it’s a brain-taxing filler that is more than capable of giving you fits (yeah… I went there).

Fourteen races struggle for control of an area too small to contain them in Small World from Days of Wonder, a modified version of designer Philippe Keyaert’s own Vinci. In addition to their own natural abilities, each race also has a special power that will aid them in their conquest until their inevitable slide into decline. These races can be controlled by up to five players, with appropriately-sized boards provided for each arrangement. There is no reading required to play the game… once everyone knows what all of the various powers do; younger players may have difficulty in that respect.

Gameplay begins with the start player selecting one of the six available race/power combinations from the line-up, which will reveal a new race as the empty space is filled. The top-most race is free to select, and a player must spend a point per skipped race for every one beneath that; the spent point remains on the skipped race(s) until that race is finally selected, awarding the accumulated points as a bonus. This procedure is followed any time a player does not control an active race on their turn. When a race is purchased, the player receives a number of tokens defined by the specific race/power combination.

Once a player has an active race (either by purchasing one or controlling one on his last turn) it’s time to conquer. Ignoring special abilities, it requires two tokens to conquer a region, plus one additional token for every piece of cardboard already on the region, whether that cardboard is enemy tokens, mountains, or some sort of structure. The player can make one final conquest attempt if they’re up to three tokens short, but it requires a fortunate roll on the Reinforcement Die (three blank sides and then results of one, two, and three). An occupied region that is conquered forfeits one token (as well as any structures) and the rest (if any) are returned to the player controlling that race to be replaced at the end of the turn. Once a player is out of tokens they can redistribute his forces among that race’s territories for defensive purposes, then they score one point for each region occupied by one of their races. Point totals are secret, so keep track of who’s racking up large totals.

Each turn a player begins with an active race, they have a choice to make: 1) pull up from the board as many tokens as they wish and continue conquering, or 2) send that race into decline. Declining a race removes every token from the board save one per region and usually forfeits that race’s special power. Declining is also the only action a player may make that turn, and only each player may only control one declined race at a time; declining a second race removes the older one from the map entirely. Careful timing of declines is a key strategy to succeeding in Small World, as each game only consists of a small number of turns (from eight to ten, depending on number of players).

What makes Small World an interesting game is the abilities of each race and the combination of those abilities with the special powers. Some powers allow you to conquer a specific type of region (or in one case, all regions) for one token less, provide bonus points for controlling specific types of regions (or for all controlled regions), or construct defenses that make your regions harder to conquer… plus a few that are tough to categorize. While some combinations may seem more powerful than others, an experienced group of players can (should) recognize these and take measures to contain them.

Unlike other territory-conquest games, Small World uses no dice to determine outcomes (except as outlined above, and that can be avoided). Without that randomness, strategy plays a much larger role in Small World‘s game play. This is always a plus in my book, and Small World is one of my favorite games of 2009 thus far. It plays quick and there isn’t a lot of downtime between your turns as long as everyone else knows what they’re doing. As an added bonus, Days of Wonder has produced an incredible box insert that supposedly allows you to store the game vertically as well as horizontally; in practice this doesn’t quite work as advertised, but the removable token tray is amazing. More game companies should pay this much attention to their packaging.