Many good options

I just finished my first game of Agricola with the newest expansion.  It has two key changes that both really improve the game - first, it adds a space that can be used as a sheep/pig/cow space at any point, or as a Family Growth from round 5 onward.  I love the extra FG in the game, particularly for the four player version.  I am not a fan of the way that the FG queue works in the old version and I dislike how important it is to gamble on start player into FG.  Having a guaranteed FG on round 5 makes sure that people can plan around growing, there is much less gambling on the timing of the regular FG tile flipping, and it also makes building extra rooms a lot more appealing.  There is so much more FG available that going up to four or five rooms becomes a lot more appealing, and I like that.

The second big change is the way the cards are designed.  One thing about the old Agricola game is that the best occupations and improvements are often the most boring and generic ones.  There are a bunch of improvements that require a number of occupations in play and give points and food.  For example, Swan Lake.

This is a good card.  It rewards you for doing something you probably want to do anyway, and is good with nearly any strategy.  Everyone wants points, everyone wants food.

But while it is a good card, it is not a good card for the game.  Everyone wants to grab Swan Lake and it works with everything.  Static value like this is boring.  What makes a game a lot more interesting is cards that are situational.  You want them to be good, but you want to make sure that they are good for specific strategies, and they should require you to have to alter your plans to best use them.

Clay Supports is a strong card and I like having it, but sometimes you don't want to use it.  You have to consider if you are going to want to build up to 5 rooms (or more aggressively, renovate to clay and build to 4 rooms).  This is an example of how cards should be made - high power level, but requiring you to think about how and when to use them.

The newer version of Agricola is full of cards like Clay Supports, both in terms of improvements and occupations.  There are all kinds of powerful things you can do, but they aren't just generic buffs.  They consistently need you to set up to make them powerful, or alter your game style substantially.  They really got away from the 'have a bunch of stuff'' cards, and that is a great thing.  In part this is great because it encourages finding interesting combos.  You really want to find cards that work together, that let you pursue narrow strategies.  With boring cards like Swan Lake there is no combo - they work with anything.  These new cards though you can't just make a tier list and draft from it - you have to carefully consider what you have and what sorts of things your cards are going to be good at.

The other thing that the new cards do is to shore up strategies that are generally quite weak.  One thing I found in Agricola classic is that grain and baking grain is not good.  The major improvements suggest that baking was designed to be a normal way to feed your family but realistically it is pretty garbage unless you have a lot of support for it.  The fundamental problem is that getting a single grain for an action is trash.  Baking is risky, and you can get blocked, so it needs to be powerful to make up for it.  In the new version there are a ton more ways to get grain and baking has a much better overall support base.  Simply put, the strategies people use to feed themselves are much more varied than they are in the base game, and I really appreciate that.

That isn't the only example though.  I got an improvement that gave me 3 food every time I took a grain, but only if the Plow space was already occupied.  3 food bonus on a space is huge, and is a good way to make a grain food plan work.  However, you have to use the grain space at specific times and you can get blocked, so you have to plan carefully around it.  This is a great card because it only works in certain circumstances, it supports some strategies but not others, but when it does work it is fantastic.

It does seem that the combination of better cards and faster FG really powers up the game.  In the game I played I tied for first in a 50/50/50/45 game.  The players were really top drawer, so high scores aren't surprising, but this is still huge even given that.  We had one player run a occupation strategy, one got 11 bonus points from a grain based improvement, and I did a fast reno to stone and played Manservant and Plow Driver to get my big game.  It felt to me like Umbra, who scored 45, didn't really have a particular *thing* that he was doing, and maybe that was why his score was lower.  (He also only needed a single plow action to get to 50, to be fair.)

(I admit, it is kind of funny that I got my big score in the new game with some cards that are in the classic game, but these are well designed cards from the classic game.)

I like a game where you put together a bunch of pieces to do big, cool stuff.  The new agricola seems like it does that, and I certainly hope to play it as often as possible over the old one.