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Review of Hacienda (second edition)
Blurb from the publisher: 'In Hacienda, you try to make a living on the pampas as an Argentinian farmer, with the money you earn by selling animals to the markets. Claim land and harvest your crops. Your aim is to bring your livestock to the most markets. With your earnings you build haciendas and water pools. You win points by forming continuous landscape chains, building houses, creating water pools and owning animals.
Are you able to farm well and make enough money by selling your animals? Can you turn your farm into a successful business?'
What you get: Your EUR 45 or equivalent will buy you Hacienda (second edition), a two to five player abstract, tile-placement board game that lasts around one hour. The game is the reimplementation of Hacienda which was published in the not-so-distant 2005.
In addition to the 12-page rulebook in English and Dutch that can also be found on the publisher's website free of charge, the game also contains the following: 2 double-sided game boards, 72 Animal cards (18 each of Sheep, Bulls, Horses and Pigs), 80 Land cards (14 each of Mountains, Forests, Meadows, Rocks and Swamps), 80 Land tiles (each side showing different player colours), 150 Animal tokens (30 tokens per player colour), 72 Money cards, 9 Haciendas, 8 Harvest tokens, 18 Water tiles (in different shapes and sizes), 5 Score markers, and one Starting Player tile.
In the interest of full disclosure, I never played the original version of Hacienda. I cannot thus compare the present edition to the one that preceded it.
Gameplay: Hacienda is played on a map depicting fields of different types, water fields and the pampas. Each player starts the game with 20 pesos, eight land cards and four animal cards. Four land cards and four animal cards are openly displayed in what is called 'the offer'. The remaining land cards are arranged in a single face down stack, while the animal cards are arranged in two equal size face-down stacks.
The game is played in turns. In each turn, a player can take three actions. There are five actions available, two of which can only be performed once per turn.
Buying land or animals allows you to either pay some pesos and choose an animal or a land from the offer, or pay one peso less and draw randomly from the assorted decks. If you are wondering why I don't mention explicitly how much you need to pay, keep on reading.
By playing a land card a player can claim a land of that particular type on the board and place his colour there. That is important for scoring reasons later on.
By playing an animal card a player can place a token of the matching animal on the pampas fields. The animal must be adjacent to a land tile belonging to that player or an identical animal. If the animal is also adjacent to the market, the player receives money directly from the bank equal to the number of animal tokens he has in that chain, added to the number of his land tiles in the chain.
Paying 12 pesos will allow a player to buy a water tile, an action he can only perform once per turn. The tile costs always the same irrespective of shape or size, and can be placed anywhere on the board on an empty pampas field.
Building a hacienda is also an action that costs 12 pesos and can only be performed once per turn. A hacienda can be placed anywhere on the board where you placed an animal token or a land tile. The number of haciendas is limited. Once the 9 haciendas from the supply have been built, the action cannot be taken.
Harvest can only be played once per turn. With it a player can place a harvest token from the supply to a land tile in his chain, earning 3 pesos for each land tile in the chain. Only one harvest can be attached to a chain of land tiles. When the supply chain runs out, harvest tiles from the board can be moved around. This allows the rescoring of chains that had been scored before, yet whose harvest tile had been removed.
Scoring takes place twice in the game. The first time is when the first animal deck is exhausted. The second is when the second animal deck is exhausted, something that also marks the end of the game. Each player scores points for the number of markets they reached, the land tiles that are part of a chain with at least three tiles, tiles and tokens adjacent to water tiles, haciendas, and money. The person with the most points wins the game.
The game also provides a variant for immediate scoring as soon as an action falls into any of the above categories, as well as special rules for different faces of the game board.
The strong points: This might be an abstract euro from the school of 'too many options too little actions', it is however a very well-designed abstract euro. The whole idea behind it is the optimization of your actions, how to do more with less. Sometimes you will pay that extra something in order to get the card that you need, other times you will be very happy with what is available on the offer. Timing your moves is of utmost importance, as is claiming breathing space for your chains. The game is immediately reminiscent of Reiner Knizia's Through the Desert with its long chains of caravans, even though the gameplay is different.
The game is not outright confrontational, I wouldn't call it however benign. There is conflict in the game; I enjoyed how it keeps conflict indirect, even though the game is ultimately about placement and gaining lebensraum. That makes it both a good family game as well as a solid gateway into euroland, always provided how easily you can locate it in your local gaming store. There are plays that can eliminate a player's chances of victory, so make sure you aren't that player. Don't let any player alone to his own devices. Your development should take precedence, when you can however use an action to both advance your cause and screw someone over, go for it. The game is all about expanding in a balanced way. Leave the haciendas for later, and you might end up with none. Leave the water tiles for later, and you might end up with none. Leave the harvests for later, and you might help others harvest their tiles more times than you harvest yours. The way you behave in the first parts of the game is very different to how you will spend your money and actions during its closing turns.
I wouldn't go as far as to call the game a brain burner, it is however a thoughtful affair that requires quite the focus. It fares very well when it comes to its plug-'n-play factor. It is very easy to understand and teach, with one important caveat: every player must understand from the very beginning the intricacies of scoring. This is even more pertinent when playing with the scoring-only-twice-in-the-game rules, as opposed to the immediate scoring variant. The latter helps a lot towards gauging who wins and why. I am actually not sure why the two methods of scoring exist; immediate scoring is vastly superior.
The game offers high replayability with its alternate board placements. Some games will be richer and some poorer, some will offer more space while some will see bitter fighting for animals and land. Tactics that work in one game might not work in the next. Idem for tactics that work with a lower number of players and which might be totally wrong in a full board. Incidentally, the game feels much more alive with five people around. It might not be the case, with the impression being nothing but an artifact of human psychology. There is however something that increases your adrenaline when you see everybody around you gathering points and you are wondering about what to do next in order to kick their asses. I did say that the game fosters conflict (but not confrontation), didn't I?
The production values are high. The art is nice, even though it is not my cup of tea. The player aids are some of the best I have encountered in any game; all the information that a player needs can be found there.
The weak points: There is literally no theme in the game. I don't necessarily mind that. Tigris & Euphrates is one of my favourite games ever, and good luck finding a theme there. All I am saying is that if you like themed games, you are likely to be disappointed. Hacienda is about the mechanics and the optimization.
Player interaction is limited to cutting people off from what they wanted to do, be it acquiring a particular card, reaching a particular land, touching a market, or buying that last available hacienda. There is nothing positive about interacting with one another. Family game, yes. Positivity, no.
The rulebook and the box itself could have benefited from additional editorial TLC when it comes to the use of English. This is not a biggie. Everything is ultimately understood, even when you read 'lang tiles' instead of 'land tiles'. What is a problem however is the cost of the buy action. The rulebook states that it costs 2 pesos to buy from the offer and one peso to pick the top card. The example after the rule names the costs as 3 and 2 respectively, something that is also the case in the player hand out. So what should it be, 2 and 1, or 3 and 2? I admit I am surprised by this twin clerical error. Usually errors affect one number, not two.
The box is less sturdy that I would have wanted. If you store your games on top of one another do not put this at the bottom end. It might not survive.
Conclusion: The second edition of Hacienda is a solid euro. For me it is a filler that will satisfy that hardcore euro itch every other month or two. For others it will be the night's main attraction, playing it multiple times over. Its utter lack of theme and its mechanistic approach to scoring might put some people off, don't say however that you were not warned.
To find out more about Hacienda and White Goblin Games, take a look at http://www.whitegoblingames.com.
Shameless plug: for more gaming news and content (including, for example, pictures of Hacienda that I am unfortunately not able to upload on RPG.net for the time being), and to better keep track of my reviews, subscribe to my Antonios S facebook and twitter page.
