Who will be my teacher?

I have been playing a bunch of Agricola on the board game site boiteajeux.  It took a bit of getting used to but I am getting comfortable with it now.  Any time you swap UIs, particularly from a physical gameboard to a computer game, it is a bit of a transition as you miss things and screw things up by accident.

I signed up for a tournament to start and my results have been mixed.  My first game I misread a card called Ceramics and doing so caused me to completely screw up my game.  It turns out Ceramics only works with ovens and not with other cooking facilities but by the time I went to click the button to make Ceramics and couldn't do so I had already committed to the line.  That caused me to have a poor game and wind up 3rd of 4 players.

In all three of my other tournament games I am currently sitting in first place though so I am cautiously optimistic.  I don't expect to win all those games because the score in Agricola can change quite dramatically in the final turn or two, and it is easy to wind up with somebody gaining 20 points in their final turn in a game that often is won at 40 points.

I wanted to play more than just four tournament games every three months though, so I looked around for other games to join.  The first thing that popped up was games that required someone to fill in for a person that had abandoned the game.  I like the idea of helping people out to finish games when a player ditches and I feel like this will give me a useful breadth of experience.

One of the things that happens in online Agricola is that when you are drafting occupations and improvements you can use online tools and lists to tell you what to draft.  They aren't perfect but they can make sure you don't take total garbage and that you don't miss the bombs.  However, using those tools means I will end up consistently drafting good cards and ignoring my bad ones.  That will teach me how to use those good cards but it won't teach me about all the ways that the bad cards are bad.

But boy you sure can learn about bad cards when you fill in for players who have ditched.  I find myself in all kinds of horrible situations where it is clear the person who was playing left because their game state was completely untenable.  I get to see the cards they slammed down and how they used them and I have been able to learn a lot about what cards just don't end up helping you the way you think they will.

The main takeaway is that a lot of people don't develop a food engine.  I have been regularly in the situation of having a good point total but no food and having no reasonable way to acquire food.  Often this results in me desperately taking spaces that have just two food on them and trying to survive that way and it has consistently been a disaster.  Not that I had any better choice given the situation I landed in, but it has certainly taught me a lot about coping with catastrophe.  I am also getting really comprehensive lessons about how food engines work and which ones don't cut it, which is helpful in the long term.

The end goal of all of this is to get practice with a huge variety of effects and situations.  There are a lot of other Agricola cards out there and new ones are going to get printed and I think that it will be useful to practice all kinds of strategies and test all the cards out so that when I run into new cards my experiences will have more breadth to them and I will be able to evaluate those cards more effectively.

I don't know if this strategy is actually the right one in terms of educating myself.  Right now I am letting random people on the internet teach me how to be bad at Agricola, which isn't useless, but maybe I should try to select for better teachers than random people on the internet.  For winning tournaments it is probably better to just play whole games through and practice drafting the standard cards over and over until I master them all.  But there is a huge amount of fun in parachuting myself into an unknown situation and then trying to extricate myself from it, so that is a good time at least.

And either way I expect to be able to put up much more of a fight when I go after the real sharks in the Agricola tournament at WBC next year.