Walnut Grove

EvEvanstar4,6

This is a short farming game, where each round you flip a disk that adds variation in each round of the game in terms of which color worker will need to eat extra cubes, how much wood you need to heat your house, what sale action gets bonus payouts and how many new tiles you get to add to your farm. The farming element is really fantastic. You add the tiles to the top of your board and then assign workers to them. Each field produces a number of matching cubes equal to it's size across multiple tiles. Of course, there are intense storing rules that can limit your harvests. Really, limitation is the name of the game here. You spend most of the game barely scraping by to survive without being inundated with unmet needs penalty tokens, and eventually you get to a place where you can get some victory points here or there. There's very low player interaction. There are some spaces on the town board that can get clogged by opponents, but it's minimal. I'd be happier with the game if it had a little more to it. As it stands it's not bad, and I'd play it every now and then maybe, when I wanted to suffer and barely scrape by in a game, but I don't see this ever becoming a mainstay, even in my love of difficult games that make you suffer. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ☆ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment

PaPahnstar7,2

This is a pretty neat game. I appreciate that buying workers isn't always the best option, or even always a smart option. You have to make sure that your workers are going to produce more than they're going to cost you, and that you won't be gaining practically nothing from having them. The colorful game pieces are what initially drew me in, I'll admit, but the game is very worthwhile. A keeper. Note: the beginning of the game is broken for players 3 and 4. They’re stuck with all bad choices.