Feed me

In December I posted about my Agricola league where I was expecting to notch two 1st, one 2nd, and one 3rd place finishes in my four games.  That might well have been good enough to win my division and move up to the next division but it turns out I actually got three 1st and one 2nd place finish to come in an overall 1st place finish with a commanding lead.

My last game to finish was this one.  In the middle of the game I thought of myself as being mid pack, likely to not lose but I didn't figure on winning.  Instead I won 42-37-30-20, a big victory.  So why did I guess my game situation so badly?  With that big a margin of victory I feel like I should have been able to tell easily.  I did have a great last turn wherein I grabbed 13 points but much of that was set up ahead of time and I should have accounted for it.

Looking back on the game I think I simply didn't add up the food situation properly.  I had a massive investment in food infrastructure given that I had the Well (5 food), Fruit Tree (6 food), Spindle (1 food), Laybout (6 food), and Sheep Farmer/Fireplace (14 food).  I had most of that set up fairly early on so I was able to focus on racking up a ton of points in the later stages of the game while my opponents regularly spent their latter turns scooping up loose food on the board or grabbing animals to cook them immediately. 

Looking at all four games I played this round there is a trend.  In three of the games I set up an excellent food engine and won the game.  One of those games was the one I just described where my engine was just a bunch of food generating cards, but both of the other games involved fast renovating into the Manservant, which is a food plan all by itself once you get it out.  In the fourth game I didn't get a food engine set up properly and I came second.  I think this is where I am at in terms of Agricola now - I really love the strategy of building one room, growing once, and setting up a food engine in the first seven turns.  Then I can spend the last seven turns of the game grabbing all the points I can, and only getting my fourth dude when I manage to get my turn at Family Growth Without Room.

At any rate I am now moving up a division so I will get to test myself against stronger opponents in the next round.  There were some good players in my division, but also some people who were fairly weak, and I don't really expect the top players to get much better in the higher division but I do expect that the minimum level of skill will rise dramatically.

Onward and upward!