Rules Agricola

How to Play Agricola: Complete Rules for New Players

Fourteen rounds, six harvests, and one question that never goes away — can you feed everyone?

Agricola is the game that made worker placement a genre. It's also famous for being cruel: you start with two family members, a two-room wooden hut, and a farm that produces nothing. Everything you need has to be taken from a board that everyone else is grabbing from too.

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Quick Answer

Place your family members on action spaces to gather resources, build your farm and grow your family. Every few rounds a harvest arrives and demands two food per adult. Score by having a bit of everything at the end.

👥 Players 1–4
🔁 Rounds 14
🌾 Harvests 6
🧠 Weight Heavy

The Core Loop

Each of the fourteen rounds follows the same rhythm, and it is worth learning this shape before anything else.

A round of Agricola

1

Reveal a new action space

A new card is turned face up, adding a new action to the board. The board literally grows as the game goes on — early rounds have very few options.
2

Replenish the accumulation spaces

Certain spaces gather resources over time. If nobody took the wood last round, there's now more wood sitting there.
3

Place family members, one at a time

In turn order, each player puts one family member on an empty action space and takes that action immediately. Continue until everyone has placed all their people.
4

Return home

All family members come back. If this round ends with a harvest, resolve it now.

What You Can Do

The available actions grow through the game, but they fall into a few recognisable groups:

🪵 Gathering

  • • Wood, clay, reed and stone
  • • Grain and vegetable seeds
  • • Food, directly (usually inefficiently)
  • • Sheep, wild boar and cattle

🏠 Developing

  • • Plough a field
  • • Sow grain or vegetables
  • • Build rooms, fences and stables
  • • Grow your family
  • • Renovate your house

The Harvest

Six times across the game, a harvest interrupts everything. It has three phases, in order:

Resolving a harvest

1

Field phase

Take one grain or vegetable from each sown field. Fields don't produce forever — each planted crop yields for a limited number of harvests.
2

Feeding phase

Pay 2 food for every adult family member and 1 food for anyone born since the last harvest. If you can't pay, you take a begging card for each missing food — each worth −3 points at the end.
3

Breeding phase

If you have at least two of an animal type, you gain one more — provided you have somewhere to put it.

Growing Your Family

You begin with two family members, which means two actions per round. Growing your family gives you a third, then a fourth, then a fifth — more actions than anyone else, every single round for the rest of the game.

The catch is that each new person needs a room to live in before they can be born, and each one raises your food bill by 2 every harvest. Family growth is simultaneously the strongest move in the game and the fastest route to a pile of begging cards.

Scoring

Agricola scores you on breadth, not depth. You get points for each category based on how much you have — and crucially, you get negative points for having none of something.

  • Fields, pastures and fenced stables — more is better
  • Grain and vegetables — counted at game end
  • Sheep, wild boar and cattle — each type scored separately
  • Rooms and house type — clay and stone rooms score more than wood
  • Family members — a solid 3 points each
  • Unused farmyard spaces — −1 each
  • Begging cards — −3 each

Which Edition Are You Playing?

The full game includes Occupation and Minor Improvement cards dealt to each player, which add enormous variety and complexity. Most editions also include a family game variant that removes them entirely.

Play the family variant first. The core farm-building puzzle is hard enough on its own, and adding fourteen unfamiliar cards to your first game turns a tough teach into an unpleasant one.

Where to spend those precious early actions is covered in your first five rounds.

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