12 years after the original release, I've been trying my hand at Uwe Rosenberg's legendary farming strategy board game, Agricola – the 2016 revised edition to be exact. As a staple for Eurogamers, this is a board game that helped set an incredible precedent as far as worker placement style engine builders were concerned, but how does it stand up in 2025?
Agricola now sits in a well-harvested landscape that sees most of the best board games offering rulesets far more vast, and many of which have taken inspiration from Agricola, having remedied its less-desirable features. However, it's thanks to the fantastic foundation that games like Agricola have laid down for the genre over the years that Eurogames are in the popular and intensely competitive state they are today. The most obvious spiritual successor for Agricola is Rosenburg's own Caverna – a Dwarf-themed farming game that now ranks slightly higher on BoardGameGeek. Others in the genre, like Doggerland, all take cues from this game with their own interesting twists.
