YORKTON - Farms Race arrived with a fair amount of positive hype around it.
For example, Farms Race is a Mensa Select Award Winner sponsored by American Mensa.
The Mensa Select seal indicates that a game is original in concept, challenging, and well-designed.
That of course would have to make designers Daniel Dranove, and Tom Weiner happy, and publisher Medium Brow Games happier still.
From a gamer perspective hype also tends to raise game expectations.
Out of the packing box Farms Race looked ready to deliver.
The box art shows the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb over a farm scape – oh yes this game is about farm animals gaining sentience going power mad and having access to nukes – crazy fun for all.
Inside the box the quality is high from the art of Michael Zhang to the card quality and nice wooden pieces.
Now the game’s creation is an interesting journey.
“Farms Race started as a mod to a zombie survival game I found on Kickstarter,” explained co-designer Tom Weiner via email. “You searched for items and built walls to hold back your opponents, but mostly you just got massacred by the overpowered zombies. We spent years modding it, changing it more and more until it had become something else entirely. We brought in more and more Eurogame mechanics, simplified everything that could be simplified, and eventually even lost the zombies... at least for now.
“What we wanted most was a game that felt like a highly interactive Eurogame with combat. We wanted it to be easy to learn and teach, but with real strategic depth that makes it hard to master. Once we decided that the game would resonate best with people as a parody of Eurogames, and Catan in particular, we settled on George Orwell’s Animal Farm as our thematic inspiration, added references and humor, and polished the rules to highlight what we think is lacking most in the Eurogame genre: a lack of player interaction and perpetual analysis paralysis.”
The game theme will immediately conjure thoughts of Animal Farm, the famed-1945 novella by George Orwell.
And since Farms Race is played on a layout of hexagonal map pieces, employs a resource gathering element which includes an ability to trade with other players, an at least superficial comparison to Settlers of Catan is inevitable.
In Farms Race you also send your forces out to secure territory through battle which brings in an element of Risk.
Given connections to other well known games, and great production, the hype and then the nukes, and this one had a lot of hope in terms of excellence.
In the end solid yes, but excellent was perhaps just a bridge too far.
The issues were smallish perhaps, but kind of nagging.
It started with each hex having human inhabitants to clear. So you invade, battle, and win so easily every time that it felt like an element just pasted on to get victory points. There was zero tension in the action.
And then the nukes. They are really put forward as a key part of the game – remember the box front art. But they seemed largely anticlimactic.
Yes in certain situations, playing the right species of animal – they each offer unique abilities – a nuke can be effective, but generally they fall short of the impact we expected.
Ultimately, the humans and nukes could be left out of Farms Race and the overall impact on game enjoyment would be minimal.
On the positive side, with a number of board lay-out options thanks to modular hexes, and a handful of different animals with their unique abilities, the reply here without duplicating previous sittings in high.
It is the element of the game Weiner said is its best.
“Farms Race is endlessly replayable,” he said. “Each player starts the game with a unique asymmetric superpower called a Mutation. Each Mutation feels exceptionally overpowered until you realize that every player in the game has an equally insane ability. Depending on which Mutation you play with, and which ones you’re up against, your strategies have to change and the game feels different from each one that came before it. How could you play the same against a player that’s immune to nukes from one that treats all resources as wilds? How could they play the same against you if you can fly your herds across your territory at the start of each of your turns versus if you can launch dead humans at them to damage their herds?”
In the end Farms Race rises above the average for sure as a rather straight-ahead territory battler, but never quite reached the level of expectation. A good collection add, but not quite one for the top shelf.
