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?

2026-08-09

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.

🎯

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

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.

Replenish the accumulation spaces

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.