AGRICOLA - Artifex Deck

Agricola is one of Uwe Rosenberg’s best-known games. It’s a game all about managing your own farm on a plot of land. You can grow vegetables and crops, or adopt an animal husbandry strategy with pastures and fences. You can increase the size of your farmhouse, and with it, your family of farmhands!

Part of the fascinating feature of Agricola comes with its modular gameplay, in the form of cards. Each player starts the game dealt Occupation Cards, and Minor Improvement Cards. It’s impossible to play all these cards during a game of Agricola. Large parts of the fun comes with prioritising which to play, and when. With the right ‘engine’, you can build quite the thriving farm!

The Agricola: Artifex Deck is an add-on deck of cards. Here you get 120 cards – 60 new Occupation Cards, and 60 Minor Improvement Cards. You can play with these instead of the cards you get in regular Agricola. Instead, you can shuffle them into the default decks and play with a mix. All cards have an ‘A’ on them so you can tell them apart, if you want to then keep them separate again. The backs of the cards remain the same, so you won’t be able to tell them apart from the base game cards.

Of the 60 Occupation Cards, some apply at different player counts. 25 work with a +1 player count; 17 at +2 player count; and 18 at +3 players. All 60 of the Minor Improvement cards are playable if playing in the solo mode.

There’s a lot of replayability in regular Agricola. But if you insert the Artifex Deck into the mixer, you’re guaranteed to have acres of room for new and wonderful strategies. Artifex, after all, is a latin phrase meaning ‘skilled’, or a practitioner of an art or craft. Can you you use these cards to create your own set of weird and wonderful farm skills?

Please note: this is a small-box expansion for Agricola. You’ll need the base game of Agricola to play the Artifex Deck.