Farland
- Board's Eye View
- Oct 16
- 2 min read
Siam Board Games' Farland is a tile-placement game where, over 12 rounds of drafting, 2-4 players will be selecting tiles from a market display and adding them to their individual farm tableaus.
Players can place tiles orthogonally adjacent to those already in their tableau or they can overlap or partially overlap tiles they already have in situ. Where a tile overlays any farm produce (crops or livestock) you add a token to your farm. These tokens, along with the images still visible on the tiles, will all potentially benefit from mid- and end-game scoring. To score for them, tho' you need to have laid pipes to irrigate the crops and set up troughs to feed the livestock. Players also score for fenced-off pastures and, incrementally, for each unique building.
The design from T-raz Piamdumrongsak and Peerawat Sanongyard makes Farland an accessible fairly intuitive game but the need to collect and place fences, pipes and troughs adds to the puzzle optimisation aspect of the gameplay. The triangular scoring means that it will usually pay to specialise, particularly in irrigated crops or unique buildings, but if your crops end up sharing a pasture with any animals they'll score nothing (as the rules explain, animals trample crops). Similarly, if you pasture an animal without any troughs, it will score you negative points!
Given that the theme of the game is farming, it seemed initially puzzling that the setting is a colony on an Earth-like planet in an alien solar system. The reason only became apparent when we progressed from the basic game to Farland's advanced rules. These introduce a 'Tech Board' of upgraded technology, all of which directly or indirectly add further ways of scoring; so, for example, if you spend an upgrade token to take a pond tile, you can treat all 10 adjacent spaces as being irrigated. Level 2 tech can only be taken when you've previously selected a corresponding Level 1 tech, so there's a further specialisation and optimisation puzzle to ponder. You get to spend an upgrade token whenever you add a building to your tableau, making tiles with buildings even more attractive under the advanced rules. On the other hand, the majority of the upgrades increase the scoring potential of crops and livestock...
