Harvest Dice

Tonight we managed to get Henry(1) to bed early so decided to have a game of one of the Bailey family’s favourite ” roll n writes” “Harvest Dice” played by myself, Katie, Jack(7) and Toby(4).

The game is fairly simple. Each player has a sheet of paper with a 6-column and 3-row grid on it. These columns are denoted by numbers 1 to 6.

There are 3 of each dice (green for lettuce, red for tomatoes and orange for carrots) and on your turn, you roll the dice and then you take a dice and have to draw the thing you took (eg a tomato) in the corresponding column.

The first time you take each crop you can place it anywhere but each subsequent time you must place it next to previous matching crops so clever placement and planning ahead is essential.

There will always be one dice left over at the end of the round and this crop is then ticked off on the merchants board which increases the value of this crop.

This is an ingenious mechanic as you want to take lots of one crop but by taking all of one crop it loses its value by not being the crop left over.

If you cannot take a crop you can feed one to your pig which gives you a chance later to mod number rolls.

The game ends when a market is maxed out (or a card is totally full) and you then multiply how many crops you have by their value. You also get points for finished rows and for pigs fed. Most points wins.

This game is super popular in our house (it’s one of Katie’s absolute favourites hence why it got played this evening.

It’s very simple to understand but the strategy needed is actually quite complex.

It comes in a super small box and you get plenty of paper sheets although as usual you could laminate and use dry wipe markers.

Its also very young kid-friendly as even the game recommends you draw a square for lettuce, a triangle for carrot and a circle for tomato meaning most reception-age kids should be fine (or you could even just put coloured spots in)… now i think about it bingo markers of 3 colours would work really well.

Excellent simple game, pretty cheap and a staple family game in our house.