Matthew BaileyGame 28 of the “Bailey Family Summer 2023 Board Game Bonanza” is “Vegetable Stock,” played by Jack (8.), Toby (5), and myself.
“Vegetable Stock” (also called “Small Farmer” in some versions) is a fairly simple card game that is essentially a sort of card game version of “Harvest Dice.” You lay out the stock cards that display stock values of 0 to 5, and you randomly add each vegetable, assigning them values from 0 to 4. The game takes place over 6 rounds. In each round, you lay 1 more card than the number of players. Each card has 3 vegetables on them. Players then draft those cards, and the remaining card adds to the stock. If something gets all the way up to 5 and has to go higher, the stock level crashes and goes down to 0. At the end of the 6 rounds, which happens in a matter of minutes, you multiply all of the vegetables you have by their stock value; the highest points win. We ended up playing this a good 5 or 6 times (ignore the fact that the first time we played it, I totally got a key mechanic wrong, and we all thought it was terrible).
What at first seems like a fairly simple concept actually becomes quite nerve-wracking, especially towards the later rounds where you are desperately trying to gauge whether to invest in a crop that might very well go bust. In many cases, the crop that you leave leftover is just as important as the crop that you take, meaning that often going last in the round is actually more powerful than going first. Toby (5), bless him, had left all of his cards out on the show, and I had to summon up every ounce of my good nature not to look at what he had on the final turn as I wrestled over what was the last card to take.
This is a simple game with a surprising amount of depth, and I would quite like to play it with a larger player count, which I will definitely do once I’m back at work in September as part of my weekly “games I played with a group of 13-year-olds” series.
Both of the boys really liked this, especially Jack, who really got the strategy needed to try and be successful. Video below of Jack’s seal of approval while Toby stretches a Jelly Snake and squeals in the background…
Production-wise, it honestly isn’t great. I don’t love the generic artwork, and it comes in one of those hook shelf cases you see in supermarkets, which are annoying to store on a shelf. The cards come with a cardboard “block” to hold them in place, which you need to keep to stop everything wiggling about in the slightly too big box. It also doesn’t come with a score sheet, which made adding up in the end a pain and had me reaching for a pad. I have included a link below to the BGG page where people have made a score sheet. I often don’t say this, but some sort of first-player marker is also needed (we used a Lego Ninjago figure).
Currently an import but the delivered price direct from the publisher is only about £1 more than the preorders are on UK websites that are due for release in the UK at the end of September.
I am not sure it is going to top my love for “Harvest Dice,” which I would 100% recommend. (Review link below) but “Vegetable Stock” is a super quick, simple but surprisingly deep card game you could play with relatively young kids all the way up to grandparents.
