Saturday, August 13, 2016

The Long & The Short Of It

Today we returned to Mama Bears Bakery & Cafe in Fishers to enjoy their sweet delectable beverages.  I had a white mocha, which as always was very sweet and flavorful.  Claire had the Passion and Desire green tea which carried a refreshingly crisp taste of fruit that did not overwhelm the green tea flavor, a great balance for a green tea.  How many times have you wanted to work on the farm, tending to the harvest after planting the seeds that would soon become nutritious sustenance for your lovable animals?  Well, in My Happy Farm that is exactly what we are going to do!  Read on to see more than just Steve planking on our game box.

In this 2 - 4 player card game, your animals are in need of food, and we’re going to fill their stomachs with tasty goodness!  It is your responsibility to be the best farmer you can be, and to do this you must plan accordingly. If you do not feed one or more of your animals, they will resent you, which takes away victory points, so we must keep them all happy!  At the beginning of the game, the animals are hungry and sad.  To make them happy we have to feed them, but before you can feed them, you have to purchase seed cards so you can plant them.  Once the seeds have evolved through the seasons, you must harvest at the start of fall.  At this point you use the crops you’ve harvested to feed your animals.  Once you feed them, you flip the sad face card to the other side making them happy!  The more you feed them, the longer they become, and the more points are awarded to you by the end of the game for the most efficiently feed animals.  The longest animals in your group also allows you to flip their bums to award them with a ribbon which can provide you with additional points at the end of the game.  The player with the most points wins!

We really enjoy this game!  It’s extremely light weight, but it’s also fun!  You still have to mentally play out your best approach throughout the game like maintaining your crops, when to sell seeds to get more money and when to purchase the right seeds for your animals.  Once you harvest your crops, you have to make sure you don’t hold them too long, because you can only hold so many crops in your supply.  Sometimes it’s best to purchase crops quicker if you can feed all of your animals and focus on making them longer, when other times it may be better to have the higher score cards, and then other times it’s somewhere between the two.  It just depends on what you have in your hands and what is available to purchase.  The artwork on the cards is very cute and certainly adds to the setting of the game.  This game has gone over quite well at the game nights that we’ve attended and it works well as a filler game.  The game may come in a small box, but as you can see it takes up a lot of room even for a two player game.  The box could have been made a little bit larger, even if only 10% or less, it still would have made the difference for us.  We have found that there is a very precise way you have to put everything away so that the lid properly closes.  It works for us because we figured out how to do it just right, but that may not be appreciated by other owners.  All of that aside, the positives definitely out weight any negatives with this game.  My Happy Farm would work well across any age range to play with, so it shines as a fun family game and we are wanting to hold onto this one long term.  

My Happy Farm
Overall Meeple Rating: 6.5/10


Game Mechanics:
1) Hand Management
2) Set Collection

Any other thoughts or questions?  Leave a comment below.

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