Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small Information Guide for Beginners

Preface

Hi, I’m Popcicle, your frozen treat superhero.

Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small is a smart little two player version of the greater Agricola board game, that’s horribly hobbled on digital format with a garbage tutorial. It took going and finding the physical copy’s rulebook to even make sense of the game… once I did, the game became much more clear. To help others, I decided to link the rulebook here for others to easily find, and to give my insights that the tutorial fails to make clear at all.

Important Note: Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small is not the same as the full Agricola board game! They have different rules. If you’re coming from the physical game world and wondering why nothing seems right, this is why.

The Rulebook

Here it is, in all it’s glory:

lookout-spiele.de – https://lookout-spiele.de/upload/en_acbas.html_Rules_AgricolaAcbas_EN.pdf

Note this takes you away from Steam – Don’t worry! It goes straight to the publisher’s website, where they have the rulebook available for free.

Helpful Notes

Here’s some important things that aren’t well spelled out in the digital version. If you’re smashing your face against the keyboard wondering why you can’t do something, these might help.

• You only get 9 fences to work with (to start). When you’re building fences, you’re taking the fence from your supply and placing it, not getting a new fence from market to place. Once you’ve used all of them from your supply, you can’t use the build fence actions. The amount you have left is the very bottom resource on the resource tracker.
• You can add an additional fences to your supply by expanding your farm. This is the only way you can get more.
• When you build a structure, it comes with “free” fences that surround it. This does not use your fence supply – use this to your advantage.
• If you place a structure down next to a space that has a fence already placed, you don’t get that fence back.
• You can use troughs to keep a single animal on a space that isn’t fenced in.
• There are a limited number of troughs, stalls and stables. They are tracked on the market stall where they are bought. There is only one of each special building, as well. It’s important to keep track!
• You can freely move your animals, but if there’s a situation where you can’t place all your animals down, the remainder are immediately lost.
• Your total VPs for each animal is calculated by adding up the number of animals your have of that type, and then adding the bonus/losing the penalty as indicated.
• You’ll get a penalty of -3 for each type of animal that isn’t at least 4. This means the difference between 3 animals and 4 animals is 4 VPs (3 animals – 3 penalty = 0 VP / 4 animals – 0 penalty = 4 VPs)
• Sheep require the most animals to start gaining bonus VPs, but can be the easiest to acquire, especially late-game.
• Pigs, cows and horses each have a correspondingly smaller threshold for number of animals to gain bonus VPs – Horses are the easiest to reach bonus with, cows less so, and pigs the least (compared to sheep).

Good Luck And Have Fun

Here we come to an end for Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small Information Guide for Beginners hope you enjoy it. If you think we forget something to include or we should make an update to the post let us know via comment, and we will fix it asap! Thanks and have a great day!