Agricola

Components

Setup

1. 1Each player takes a farmyard board plus 5 people, 4 stables, and 15 fences of their color. Place 2 of your people in the 2 starting wood rooms; the other 3 stay in your supply (unborn family members).
2. 2Attach the game board extension matching your player count — the 2-player and 3-4 player boards have different Action spaces.
3. 3Randomly determine the starting player. The starting player takes 2 food; everyone else takes 3 food.
4. 4Shuffle the 48 Minor improvement cards and deal 7 to each player. Do the same with the 48 Occupation cards. Return any leftover cards to the box — you will not draw more during the game.
5. 5Place all 10 Major improvement cards face up on the supply board; they are shared by everyone.
6. 6Sort the 14 Action space cards by the stage number on their backs and stack them with stage 1 on top. Reveal one new card from this stack each round.

Round structure — 4 phases

Every round follows Preparation → Work → Return home → Harvest (on harvest rounds only). All 14 rounds are played, and a harvest occurs only at the end of rounds 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 14.

1. 1① Preparation: draw the top Action space card and place it on the round space matching the current round number, revealing a new Action space. Refill every accumulating space (marked with an ochre arrow) with its listed goods, even if goods remain from the previous round.
2. 2② Work: starting with the first player and going clockwise, each player places one person on an empty Action space and immediately carries out its action. Continue until everyone has placed all their people. Each Action space holds only 1 person per round.
3. 3③ Return home: only after everyone has placed all their people do you return them to their rooms — never earlier.
4. 4④ Harvest (on harvest rounds only): resolve the Field phase, then the Feeding phase, then the Breeding phase. Rounds without a harvest skip this step entirely.

Types of worker-placement Action spaces

Expanding your house and growing your family

1. 1Use the "Build Rooms" action on the Farm Expansion space, paying 5 wood + 2 reed, to add one wood room. It must be empty and adjacent to an existing room; you may build several rooms in a single action if you can afford them.
2. 2Once you have more rooms than people, use "Family Growth with Room Only" (available between rounds 5-7) to bring a person in from your supply. They move into an empty room during Return home, and can act starting next round.
3. 3On the House Redevelopment space (available between rounds 5-7), take the "Renovation" action to turn all of your wood rooms into clay rooms at once — paying 1 reed for the roof plus 1 clay per room.
4. 4Later, take "Renovation" again on the same space to turn all clay rooms into stone rooms — paying 1 reed for the roof plus 1 stone per room.
5. 5Once your house is clay (or stone), building new rooms costs clay (or stone) instead of wood — 5 units plus 2 reed.
6. 6The Urgent Wish for Children space (appears in round 12 or 13) lets you grow your family even without a spare room. That new person still needs somewhere to live, so if you also built a room that turn, they move into it.

Cultivation and animal husbandry

1. 1Use "Plow a Field" to place 1 field tile on an empty space. Your first field may go anywhere empty; later fields must be adjacent to an existing field.
2. 2The Grain Seeds space (available from the start) grants 1 grain into your supply. On the Sow space (available between rounds 1-4), take "Sow" to place 1 grain or vegetable from your supply onto an empty field, then add 2 more grain (or 1 more vegetable) from the general supply — a newly sown grain field holds 3, a vegetable field holds 2.
3. 3Sown crops stay on the field, unusable, until harvested. Only the Field phase of a harvest moves 1 crop per field into your supply where you can actually use it.
4. 4On the Fencing space, pay 1 wood per fence to enclose a pasture. Your first pasture may be built anywhere empty (as long as it's fully enclosed); later pastures must be adjacent to an existing one.

Harvest — Field, then Feeding, then Breeding

1. 1Field phase: move exactly 1 crop from each of your fields into your supply. You must harvest every field, with no exceptions.
2. 2Feeding phase: pay 2 food per person in your family (newborns from this round need only 1). Grain and vegetables each count as 1 food, and Major improvements like the Fireplace or Cooking Hearth can convert them more efficiently.
3. 3If you can't pay enough food, take 1 Begging marker for each unit still missing.
4. 4Breeding phase: if you have at least 2 animals of the same type, gain 1 offspring of that type from the general supply, but only if you have room for it. At most 1 newborn per type, per harvest.

Cards — Major, Minor, and Occupation

Three card types shape every game differently: Major improvements (red, 10 cards, shared), Minor improvements (orange, 7 of 48 in your hand), and Occupations (yellow, 7 of 48 in your hand). This guide does not list every individual card's effect — it covers only the structure, since actual effects always follow the text printed on your cards.

Final scoring

End of the game

The game ends once the harvest of round 14 is complete. There are no extra rounds or bonus turns — final scoring happens immediately afterward.

Strategy tips

• Secure food self-sufficiency (baking grain, raising sheep or boar) early — unpaid harvests pile up Begging markers that cost a lot at the end.
• More people means more actions per round, but also a bigger food bill every harvest — deciding your family size around round 7 is a common turning point.
• Every unused farmyard space loses a point, so avoid leaving fields, pastures, or rooms empty for the whole game.
• Since you never draw more Minor improvements or Occupations, review your starting 7+7 cards early and commit to a direction — animals, cultivation, or card combos.
• The Major/Minor Improvement and Lessons spaces are popular and get claimed quickly, so plan your turn order around cards you really need.

Player-count variants and editions

The 2-player and 3-4 player games attach different board extensions, changing which Action spaces are available. The round count and harvest timing stay the same regardless of player count.

• Solo game: play the 2-player rules alone. You start with 0 food, each adult needs 3 food at feeding (newborns still only need 1), and only 2 wood (instead of 3) is placed on the Forest space each round.
• The 2016 Revised Edition significantly reduced the Minor improvement/Occupation deck (308 cards down to 96) and redesigned the resource tokens. This guide follows that revised English rulebook.
• Korea Boardgames officially distributes an "Agricola 15th Anniversary Edition" (along with expansions such as the Neighborhood Rivals deck). However, this guide cross-checked the English Revised Edition rulebook, and the exact wording of the Korean 15th Anniversary manual has not been verified.

Frequently confused rules

History and editions

Agricola was designed by Uwe Rosenberg, published in German by Lookout Games in 2007 and in English by Z-Man Games in 2008. It won the 2008 Deutscher Spiele Preis (ranked #1) and the International Gamers Award for strategy games, and for a time took over the #1 spot on BoardGameGeek's rankings from Puerto Rico.

The 2016 edition substantially trimmed the Minor improvement and Occupation decks (from 308 cards down to 96) and redesigned the resource tokens. This guide cross-checked that revised rulebook. A simplified 2-player spin-off, All Creatures Big and Small, was released in 2012.

Namuwiki's Korean-language article on Agricola confirms the lineage from the 2006 original to the 2016 revision, and notes that an upcoming "SE" edition combining both decks is planned for crowdfunding around October 2026, with no Korean localization announced yet. The article does not confirm any official Korean release or distributor for the earlier editions; a Danawa price-comparison listing separately confirmed a Korea Boardgames "Agricola 15th Anniversary Edition" product.