Being weird doesn’t mean good gameplay but does mean a closer look

Farmers Finances was a game that I discovered shortly after I started seriously looking at Print and Play. It placed first in the 2016 9-Card Design Contest, which was why I found it so easily. I played it occasionally for a couple years and then set it aside.

I will say that, when I was doing a heavy possession purge while preparing for a cross country move, Farmers Finance survived.

It’s a commodity trading game that consists of nine cards. Plus one die and a few tokens. I have seen a lot of minimalistic games over the last several years and Farmers Finances is still impressively minimalist.

In fact, three of the cards are used to track money and the market. There are only actual six cards that you are doing stuff with. Four wheat and two cows. You spend the entire game buying and selling these cards over and over.

The last time I really looked at Farmers Finances, I couldn’t decide what I thought of it. I felt like it was a unique, downright fascinating design. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure the actual gameplay was that strong.

Obviously, you want to buy low and sell high. And you can increase the value of your wheat by turning it into bread. The decisions are pretty obvious and the random market changes have a big effect on how things go.

Having gone back to it after a number of years, I feel like the pros and cons have actually just gone more extreme. On the one hand, I found the choices even more limited. On the other hand, I have played dozens of Print and Play games and I have still played nothing like it.

Ultimately, Farmers Finances is like a dancing bear. It isn’t that it’s a good dancer. It’s just amazing that it dances at all.

And here’s the thing. The game is nine cards. That’s not the minimum amount of construction for a Print and Play but it’s still very low. It’s such an unusual experience that I think it’s worth making and playing.

Cramming an economic game into nine cards

Farmers Finances is a weird game. It’s a commodity game that’s made up of nine cards. And two of them are basically just score cards! It’s a game where you buy and sell the same six cards over and over.

There are four wheat cards with bread on the other side, plus two cow cards. There are two score/money cards, one for each player or a spare to use as a timer if you play solitaire. And you have a market card which randomly determines basically if there’s a high supply or demand each turn.

On your turn, you can do one of three things: buy one card; flip one or more wheat cards over to their more valuable bread side; sell all of one type of card. If someone buys the last of the six commodity cards, there is an automatic sell phase where every card gets sold back to the market. 

The game ends when someone reaches seventy coins. If it’s the first player, the second player gets one last turn to try and exceed their score.

I went into Farmers Finances with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I found the idea of a minimalist economic game like this fascinating. Seriously, it’s a commodity game with only six commodities! That’s crazy. On the other hand, that’s crazy. I seriously wondered if the game was too bare bones, if it would fall apart from not having enough there.

After playing the solitaire variant several times... I still don’t know.

If Farmers Finances has any legs, the small footprint and short playing time will be a big part of it. The game is small enough you can play it on an airplane tray and still have room for drinks and peanuts. And I don’t think the barebones simplicity could support even a fifteen minute play time. But it might be good for five minutes and most games that short aren’t economic games.

I also have to wonder if the game can be easily solved. There’s an obvious of choice of either going for wheat to sell bread for the best return rate or going for cows which have a faster turn around. Of course, the market die roll will play crucial part in how much you earn or lose.

I suspect that bread is the better general strategy. Even if it costs you an extra turn, that can be the way of dodging a bad market role. But, in the two-player game which I haven’t tried yet, I don’t think anyone will be able to corner the market on wheat.

Farmers Finances has passed the first test of a PnP game for me. It has been worth printing out and laminating nine cards. It gets bonus points for me still interested in playing it. However, I don’t know if it will be a game that will still be interesting after, say, a dozen plays and I still don’t know how it will play with two players.

I don’t think it has the legs to be a part of my regular toolbox but it fascinates me enough that I keep on playing. 

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/201028/farmers-finances