Harvest Is a Bounty of Board Game Fun

Harvest originally came out in 2017 from the now-defunct Tasty Minstrel Games, which published it as a small-box game despite its medium complexity. Tasty Minstrel went out of business in 2021, leaving a number of great games in publishing limbo, although we’ve seen Orléans (Capstone), Yokohama (Synapses), and Gold West (Trick or Treat) come back into print in the last year or so. The new version of Harvest came out last year from Keymaster Games, which gave the game a real redesign to make it a larger-box title, with a better board and overall table presence, along with some improvements to the rules and mechanics to create a farming-themed board game that is actually fun.

Agricola has long been the gold standard among farming-themed games, unless you’re partial to its successor, Caverna, which has a lot of the same mechanics but is just Much More. Both games introduce a fair amount of stress to gameplay because you have to feed your family at the end of certain rounds or lose a significant amount of points, and setting up some kind of engine to provide food regularly is difficult—and that’s before you start trying to figure out how to get enough points to win. Agriculture may be work, but this is board gaming. We are here to have fun. Well, most of us are, at least.

The new version of Harvest does that, in spades—pun intended. It’s also a worker-placement game, where over the course of four rounds, you’ll place your three wheelbarrows into the four areas of the common board so you can buy seeds, gain water or fertilizer, plant/tend/harvest crops, or clear your fields and/or build buildings for new actions and points. There is still tension involved, but no one is starving, and the simplicity of the board means that it’s hard not to get something growing.

The beauty of Harvest is that the game is constantly giving you things—you get a unique character that has some power, you get a Sunrise tile at the start of each round that gives you money and usually one or two resources or free actions, and you can use some spaces on the board that give you money or resources in exchange for getting to take fewer actions on that turn. These guardrails prevent you from getting too stuck; there should always be something for you to do.

There are four crops in Harvest, each of which has its own cost in water and/or fertilizer (yep, there are manure tokens), and they each work a little differently in how you plant or tend them while each takes up a different size and shape on your farm board. That board starts with just eight open squares for planting, but you can clear up to 24 more (four at a time) to plant more crops or build buildings. When you harvest, you get 1/1/4/6 points depending on the crop, plus 1 coin for each unique crop type in your harvest. The details of each crop differ slightly, so that there’s some synergy in planting certain types together, and that any strategy should use at least two crops with an eye towards buildings that work in tandem with whatever you’re planting.

The Sunrise tiles also bear numbers that determine the turn order for that round, so you can always choose a lower-numbered tile—which confers fewer or just weaker benefits—to try to go first and grab one of the best spaces. The “farmer’s market” area has three tiles that change in each round and are often the most powerful action spaces on the board, requiring a payment of 1 to 4 coins to use them but usually combining actions from different areas of the board that would otherwise require multiple turns. It means every game is different and every round within a game is different, and encourages you to think flexibly as you go through the game to try to set yourself up to take advantage of whatever tiles might appear in the next round.

Play continues through the four seasons, with each player getting 12 turns in total (but more than 12 actions), planting and harvesting crops, clearing land, and building buildings for immediate bonus actions and end-game points. You need coins to buy the basics, with all buildings costing 1-3 coins depending on where they are in the market—they get cheaper each round if they’re not purchased—but the heart of the game is in the farming aspects rather than the economic side. You need seeds, compost, water, and land; if you line up those resources and your actions correctly, you’ll get four or five harvests over the course of the game, gaining points and a few coins as you go.

Where Harvest separates itself from other farming-themed games is that it’s designed to be playable for everyone: There isn’t a steep learning curve, the board has several action spaces that can help you if you’ve boxed yourself into a corner (e.g., you’re out of water/compost/coins), and the main ways to play are pretty obvious: You need to pick some crops, plant ‘em, tend ‘em, harvest ‘em, and then do something with your profits. In my plays so far, I’d say it’s easy to play, and modestly hard to play well, getting towards that sweet spot for a great board game that you can break out with lots of different groups. And there’s no stress about feeding your family, either.

Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.