Matthew BaileyGame 54 of the “Now and Then Summer Marathon” is “Pocket farm”
“Pocket Farm” is a tile-laying game that is similar to titles like “Nimalia,” “Chomp,” and a few others where you have four grids on a card that we have played recently.
The difference with this one is that it has quite an unusual currency system in terms of how you pay for your cards. Each game consists of 12 rounds, divided into a draft phase and a placement phase.
Each player gets a starting farm card which has a fruit and some weather on it. You draft your cards from offerings in the middle, where you get a choice of one more card than the number of players. After you have drafted your card, it is your turn to place it or keep it in your hand for the time being.
Each card has a cost in the middle of it, and in order to play that card, you must have the required amount of points available to you as per the weather visible on your grid. Suns work better together, with one sun being worth two points, two suns that are touching worth two each (totalling four), or three suns each touching worth three each, up to a total of nine. This means suns are either worth one, four, or nine points depending on how many you have.
Clouds work in the exact opposite way. A cloud on its own is worth three points, two clouds together are worth two points each (totalling four), and three clouds together are worth one point each.
It’s a really odd way of doing it, and while I found it easy to understand, both the kids and Katie (strangely, although she had had two glasses of wine at this point) found this aspect quite tricky.
You continue to lay the tiles until you have gone through the 12 rounds, at which point it’s time to add up the scoring. Scoring ends by adding up the value of the baskets that are adjacent to each fruit. If a basket, let’s say of value 2, is next to two apples, you only get the score of one apple. So really, you want to spread out the fruit and have as many baskets touching each fruit as possible. You then multiply the score of the baskets by how many of that fruit you have in the first place to get your final score. It’s worth noting that the suns and clouds are absolutely meaningless at this point, they are just used as currency to buy things during the game.
I really liked this game, but oddly, both Katie and Jack weren’t as keen and found both the currency system and the scoring at the end to be a bit confusing and not as good as it could be.
Overall, I actually think this is quite a good game, and the fact that it’s relatively small means that it works quite well as a travel game. However, it does have a very unusual way of laying cards, so you have to kind of forget how these games normally work.
“Pocket Farm” is a Japanese import but can be obtained from “https://travel-games.co.uk/” as per usual, which I would 100% recommend for all weird and wonderful import board games.
Disclaimer: Pocket Farm was gifted to me by Ben Davenward from Travel Games alongside another purchase I made. Ben Davenward is part of our community and I consider him a friend. I do however use Travel Games personally to purchase import games and would 100% recommend their service.
