La Granja Board Game First Impressions
La Granja!
‘Cause if it was just called “The Farm” everyone would laugh at it.
In La Granja, players control small farms by the Alpich pond near the village of Esporles on the island of Mallorca. Over time, the players develop their farms and deliver goods to the village. Players are vying to earn the title of “La Granja” for their country estate!
So… farming again. How do you do it this time? (Warning: It’s quite dull to describe)
Well, this one is played over 6 rounds, broken into phases of a total of 14 actions per round.
Phase 1
Phase 1 lets you play a card and draw up to your hand limit. Cards have 4 uses and where you slot them in your player board shows you what that particular card is doing.
For example, this card is slotted in the top of my board and is used as a Carriage. The cutouts in the board work very well at hiding the other detail on the card.
Then the game appeals to my Terra Mystica-loving side by letting you collect income for each ‘thing’ on your board with a hand underneath it.
Then you add goods to your fields. Fields are cards you played to the left of your board. You also add a pig to the right. I say add a pig, everything.. and I mean everything is represented by Hex pieces.
Then you take turns buying one roof token… These give you a one-shot free action and it covers a space on your farm roof. They cost 1 coin x the round number and you score points by covering spaces on your board. the more you buy over the game the more points they’ll get you.
Phase 2
Phase 2 is the dice phase…
The start player rolls 2 dice per player plus 1. Then each player takes turns taking a dice and taking the action of that number, twice. The leftover dice will give their action to everyone.
Phase 3
Phase 3 is all about Siestas and Donkeys. A donkey lets you move your food around your board and fill Carriages. Carriages give you a trade good and VPs and let you put a token on a Marketplace board.
Depending on the value of your Carriage, you put a token of your colour on any Hex of that number. Then you bump any adjacent tokens of lower value next to that token from the board. The higher the number and the more tokens you bump, the more points you get.
The grids around the outside let you use Donkey actions to fill a row to score points and give you a tile that grants you some extra income.
Then players move up the Siesta track, this awards points and determines turn order for the next round. Also, players can spend money to buy extra Donkey/Delivery actions if they like now.
Phase 4
Phase 4 is tidying and scoring. You get points for each token you have on those market hexes so bumping people off them is a good thing.
Then you reset and do it all again.
La Granja Summary
Now, it sounds really boring, but it isn’t. It’s actually pretty good. It’s Marco Polo good, it’s not quite Bora Bora good though.
The multi-use cards will make for a decent amount of replayability or just messing around with trying different stuff. What your opponents do, or are doing matters and quite often you may have to sacrifice something to get up the turn order to take an action before someone else.
Looks dull, and sounds dull, but is a really fun game I look forward to playing again.
Jesta ThaRogue
