Formidable Farm Game Review

I’ve never fully jived with resource management and conversion as a gameplay mechanism. Some of my favorite games are heavy on resource management—Beyond the Sun, Barrage, and Brass leap to mind—but I tend to shy away from such designs. No Agricola or New Bedford or Gaia Project for me, thank you so much for asking. With rare exception, I find the practice tedious. The need to do X so I can do Y so I can do Z is not pleasurable for me.

Despite that, I found myself drawn to Friedemann Friese’s Formidable Farm, a game whose box might as well carry a sticker crying out, “Oops!, All Resources!” You start the game with a deck of cards, each containing a resource conversion equation (spend one Sheep to gain two Tomatoes and a Wheat, as an easy example), and you win by being the first player to empty both your deck and your hand. This is Efficiency: The Game, and ain’t no mistake.

So why, then, do I find myself rather fond of this game? I can’t be sure. The art certainly helps. Sylvain Leroy manages to imbue simple drawings of wheat and tomatoes and pickles with personality. The farmers who populate this market and the coins that decorate the back of every…

The post Formidable Farm Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.