Welcome to the Sacred Valley, where farming families have always focused heavily on perfecting the growth of their favorite crop. Now, it’s time to expand the small family business by learning new technologies and hiring specialists to diversity your crops and be the best farming family in the valley!

What Is It?

Tile Placement (Farming) – Throughout the game players will be placing seed tiles onto the terrace to score harvest points, which they’ll cash in for coins. The bigger the farmland area of seeds they play into, the more harvest points they’ll score for that placement.

Variable Powers – In addition to seeds and technology cubes, which players need to buy for planting, players can purchase specialists which can give them ongoing, immediate, or one-time abilities

Who Is It For?

  • 3 to 5 Players – Scales well at any count
  • Ages 12 & Up / Mid-Weight Gamers – Pretty streamlined rules, and quick turns, may be hard for some players to know when it’s best to cash in and reset their harvest points, versus when to hold off in hopes of building up further
  • Fans of tile placement, farming, and a shared board where area growth affects future players

PROS

  • Aesthetics – Great table presence / art
  • Components – Nice tiles, player boards, and tokens
  • Rules are well written and clear
  • Smooth, quick game turns
  • A bunch of variety with the specialists
  • I like that players can’t plant every type of seed from the start, and that they can never have access to them all, so they have to weigh their options wisely

CONS

  • It didn’t feel great to see players after you get a better return on larger farmlands than you; you often feel like you’re just setting others up to do well, and if people block areas off, you won’t get to reap the same benefit. Seen more with higher player counts.
  • I thought a lot of specialists seemed kind of costly for the return they gave
  • It’s a small thing, but I thought it was odd that the player unlocking the 2nd or 3rd terrace level just got to pick another player (work partner) who had to pay the fee too.

Final Thoughts

I came in pretty middle of the road on this one. I appreciated the smoothness of the overall flow, but I just thought the game itself was a little dry. It could be disappointing at times if a farmland you wanted to get in on gets blocked off, and you have to start a new one, getting only 1 harvest point for it.

Ultimately, I just felt like you didn’t have a lot of choice on your turns because, despite having 3-4 actions available, there always seemed like a best option, so you didn’t often feel like your choice was super meaningful.

I think if you’re bigger on the farming theme, you might like this a bit more than me, so it might be worth checking out!

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 5/10

Designer – Jeffrey CCH
Artist – Brendan J. Lancaster
Publisher – North Star Games
MSRP – $49.99
Website

*I was provided a copy of this game to do this review*

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