Farm Club

Shut The Gate

I absolutely love animeeples. Wooden tokens shaped like piggies, ducks, and more. And Farm Club has an entire bag of the little lovelies! Why? Well, in Farm Club our job is to put these chunky little chaps in the perfect pens so that we can score lots of points!

Duck, Duck, Goat

Essentially a placement optimisation puzzle with entwined drafting, Farm Club plays over 9 rounds. Each player has a board comprising 3 x3 grid and there is a row of objective cards (each one paired with a randomly picked animeeple) as well as a row of Leader cards (with one of each animeeple waiting to be selected). There’s also a pile of bird tokens – more on those in a minute!

The rules are super simple. Each turn you either (a) hire an animal or (once per game) (b) elect a Leader. When you hire an animal, you pick an objective card together with its paired animal and place the token on your board. Once the animal is penned, you can keep it there or, if you want to swap its location with any other pen (except the centre square), you can but must discard the objective card you have just picked up. At the end of your turn, check to see if you have achieved any of the objective cards showing a lightning symbol in your collection. They’ll be things like duck next to goat, or pig between two sheep etc. If you have, they get flipped and banked for end game scoring. All others including those showing an hourglass (which are predominantly majority objectives) remain open until either achieved (lightning) or end game (hourglass).

If you place an animeeple that matches the icon printed on your board, you also get a bird token. This lets you clear the animeeples or objective cards in the offer row at the start of a future turn. You can also get bird tokens by placing the animeeples in exactly the right sequence shown printed on some of the objective cards.

Should you decide to elect a Leader, you pick one of the Leader cards and any one of the animeeples available from the pool and place it in your centre square. If you have all the animals in the quantities required in your farm already, immediately flip it over. Plus, if its placement achieves any other open lightning objectives, flip those too!

Once all players have placed their 9th animeeple, the game ends and the scoring begins. Players receive the points indicated on each achieved objective card (lightning and hourglass) as well as a point for each unused bird token.

Final Thoughts

Farm Club is a light but fun placement optimisation puzzle. It plays super-fast, is really colourful, and I love the animeeples! It also does well on scaling for different player counts as the number of available objectives, Leaders, and animeeples depends on how many people are playing. The placement icons on the objective cards are easy to learn and we remembered what they each represented after only a few turns.

Everything is open-information, and I also love the fact it uses multi-use cards. Having an objective that also acts as your only way to move animeeples around your board creates a nice tension. Do you sacrifice the objective to ensure you score one you already have, or keep it and potentially lose out on the other goal/hope that you’ll be able to score it later?

The fact that some goals have higher point values can help prioritise what to go for and introduces a push-your-luck element that’s really enjoyable. Depending on what your neighbours do or don’t have in order to win end game majority objectives is also cool. Plus placing just to get a bird token is really tempting – refreshing the animeeples or objectives could give you the perfect combination to bank multiple objectives on your turn and/or at end game. But likewise, luck of the draw could leave you with nothing better than you had before plus you’ll have lost a point by using a bird token!

Knowing when to tip your hat and elect a Leader is also a neat trick. With only 9 spots to fill, hate-drafting is pretty tricky to pull off as 99% focus is on your own puzzle placement. But if there’s a perfect objective for your opponent, or the Leader cards are all wildly different and your opponent is gearing up to take a specific one, the temptation to swipe first is strong!

Yes there’s luck of the draw in this game. But the use of bird tokens and the ability to discard an objective to swap animeeples around mitigates it well. Plus, although it is abstract at its heart, I really like the setting – moving animals around my farm so they buddy up with their beasty besties!