Harvest Trilogy by Uwe Rosenberg

 Today, many thousands of people play flash games dedicated to the development of personal virtual farms in various social Internet networks. They grow virtual crops, sell them, earning virtual money for the purchase of virtual equipment, seeds or elements of the exterior. Uwe Rosenberg's "Harvest Trilogy" (Agricola, Le Havre, At the Gates of Loyang) allows board game lovers to do almost the same thing.

 Agricola, as you know, was the #1 game in BoardGameGeek's overall tabletop rankings for a long time, until it lost the honorable "gold" to good old Puerto Rico, falling to second place. Le Havre ("Havre"), which came out a year later, firmly established itself in the top ten and is currently in 6th place in the overall standings. The third part of the trilogy - At the Gates of Loyang (hereinafter simply "Loyang") - in my opinion, is greatly underestimated and is now in 113th place. Despite the fact that these games are very different, they also have undeniable similarities, which we will talk about.

 According to Rosenberg himself, "Loyan" was created even before "Agricola" and, in fact, the first part of the trilogy took a lot from this prototype. Therefore, it makes sense to consider "Loyan" as a prequel rather than as the final part. Perhaps that is why Le Havre stands out somewhat among the games of the trilogy, even by the parameter that gave the trilogy its name. The mechanics of crop harvesting in Agricola and Loyana are identical: the player sows the field and removes a resource unit from the field each round. In Havre, everything is done more mechanistically and abstractly from reality. Everything is simple there: the player has at least one unit of wheat - get one more, has at least two cows - get one more. There is no need to sow fields and build pens, resources multiply by themselves. And what did you want? A game about a port city, not a farm. After all, many of the city dwellers do not even know about how the harvest actually turns out! :-)

 Now let's talk about the interaction of players. "Agricola" and "Loyan" are games with a high value of the "solitaire" parameter. Each player boils in his cauldron, on his personal field. And only in a certain separate phase of the round do the players' interests intersect. In "Agricola" these are the moments when the members of the farming family are sent for day work to the common playing field. In "Luoyang" there is a drawing of cards according to certain tricky rules in order to get clientele for sales, new fields, markets or one-time assistants. In Havre, this "solitaire" is significantly less. At the personal disposal of the player is only some set of buildings/ships and resources built or bought by him. At the same time, the action phase is full of moments of activation of someone else's building. Players always use the capabilities of other people's buildings, often paying the owner of the building a penalty for doing so. And the main nuance is that such actions can greatly damage the plans of other players, because for now there is a chip on a specific building, it cannot be used. In fact, a good half of every player's moves in Le Havre are interactions with other people's personal zones.

 Food as a payment for development occurs at the end of each round in Agricola and Le Havre. The sword of Damocles hangs over the players for not being diligent enough in this matter. This forces you to divide your tactics into two fronts: get food and try to do it as efficiently as possible, so that more actions are left for the direct development of the farm (construction of buildings/ships). By this factor, Luoyang's gameplay is distinguished by a simpler formula of the player's goal: more money and no additional aspirations. Perhaps that is why this game did not reach the top ranks among experienced and experienced players: it is too simple.

 Winning points (PZ) and methods of obtaining them. Here, all the games of the trilogy demonstrate different approaches, and the most complex scheme is observed in "Agricola". Here you need to try to set all lines of development in motion so as not to catch fines. The farm should be self-sufficient, it should have fields with wheat and vegetables, and pens with different types of livestock. The state of each line of development will result in a certain amount of points, which are added up. Calculating software in Le Havre is almost identical to the same process in Race for the Galaxy: the values of each building/ship constructed plus the cash remaining on the balance are added up. "Loyan" flaunts a unique software acquisition system. The main difference is that here the SPs are calculated at the end of each turn, and not just at the end of the game. Accumulation occurs by spending the money earned by the player, that is, points are simply bought. For a small fixed price, a player can advance his chip only one position per round. Each additional move costs a lot of money, and the higher the player's position on the software line, the more expensive the additional steps. The very fact that Luoyang buys points every round might also knock this game off the list of veteran players' favors: again, too easy.

 Finally, I want to say the main thing: all the games of the trilogy, despite their commonality in some areas and belonging to the same class of eurogames based on resource management, play completely differently, so it is quite normal to have all of them in your collection. I will only stop those who are looking for a family game to spend time with their children from blind buying. A child under the age of 12 is unlikely to be able to draw up rules and seriously plan their own development strategy.