The Farming Game

"The Farming Game" is a board game simulating the economics of a small farm. Published in 1979, it was designed by George Rohrbacher, a rancher in Washington State. "The Farming Game" painfully reflects the real life difficulties of running a farm. Also, the names and places in the game are the names of families farming for generations in Yakima Valley and other parts of Central Washington. When Rohrbacher invented the game, it was a desperate time for his failing farm and small family, this is reflected in the difficulty of the game, and the multitude of points taken into consideration in farming that are often left up to chance. It is considered a board game which has educational value. [http://www.farmgame.com/printouts/instructions.pdf]

The game's objective is to raise money by harvesting crops and selling livestock, including hay, fruit, grain, and cattle. This is done by moving around the board using one die, similar to "Monopoly". Each trip around the board represents a year of farming, and players can increase their chances of earning more money by planting more crops or raising more livestock, which can be purchased by exercising the option given from an Option to Buy (O.T.B.) card a player has drawn during the course of the game.

Elements of the game are intended to reflect aspects of real-life farming. For example, players sometimes encounter "Farmer's Fate" cards that are either good or bad, similar to the "Chance" cards found in "Monopoly". One such card allows you to go to winter and collect your annual $5000 bonus. Another card informs you that you may not collect on any of your harvests for the rest of the year. These cards are intended to reflect the element of chance or luck that is involved in farming, which is the aim of the game.

Game Play

The board itself is divided into squares representing forty-nine of the fifty-two weeks in a year, with different sections grouped together under the usual harvest for that season. Whereas there are multiple sections for harvesting hay (your first, second, third, and even fourth cutting), Livestock are sold only once a year. Similar to real life, poor timing (or unlucky die rolls) can cause the player to miss, or skip over, a harvest.

Players take turns rolling a die, traveling around the board, harvesting their crops when they can. Crops are purchased through O.T.B. (Option to Buy) cards usually referencing "Neighbor Sells Out: 10 Acres Grain", the crops are grouped into Hay, Grain (Wheat and Corn), Fruit (Apples and Cherries), and Livestock (Cattle). Whereas hay is the cheapest to purchase and most often harvested, just as in real life, the chance for large profit is much smaller than with livestock or fruit. What balances this game, and provides the most difficulty for real life farmers, are operating expenses. In "The Farming Game", whenever a player harvests a crop, he draws a card entitled "Operating Expense", examples of which are "Pay $500 for Irrigation" or "Seed Bill Due: Pay $1,000". Also, certain spaces on the board instruct the player to draw a "Farmer's Fate" card. "Farmer's Fate" cards are usually unfortunate for the player, including references to the drought in the 1970s in which all the player's livestock are slaughtered.

trategy

"The Farming Game" is a heavily chance dependent game, and thus the winner is usually determined by luck.Fact|date=September 2007 However, a player can increase his or her chances of winning by knowing which crops are more likely to be profitable and use this information to make advantageous trades with other players.

Based upon the probabilities of landing on each square and the average selling price of each commodity, Hay is slightly less profitable than Grain, while Cattle averages about 1.5 times as much profit as Grain. Fruit is even more lucrative, earning about 2.5 times as much profit as Grain.

Thus, a player's first choice should always be to plant as much Fruit as possible. In fact, the advantage is so great that the winner will usually be the player lucky enough to draw the most "O.T.B. Fruit" cards.

A player's second choice should then be to raise Cattle, however, the game limits the number of Cattle you can raise on the farm to 20. In order to raise more, you must lease additional land, but in doing so you must pay a large fee. "This fee is, in fact, higher than the total profit you are likely to earn on the Cattle by the end of the game!" In other words, not only will you likely lose money on the investment, but you will also be losing the opportunity to invest your money in more profitable commodities. Thus, you should "never" lease additional land to raise Cattle.

A player's third choice should then be to choose to focus upon either Grain or Hay. If two players can agree to swap commodities so that one grows only Grain while the other grows only Hay, then they will both have a slight advantage over other players who grow both crops because they will pay less in harvesting fees. Note, however, that the Grain player will still have a slight advantage over the Hay player, which may make negotiating such a deal difficult. Another disadvantage to this strategy is that it decreases both player's chances of harvesting. If a player grows both, he removes a lot of the variability involved in his expected profit.

External links

* [http://www.farmgame.com/ "The Farming Game"]
*bgg|5185|"The Farming Game"