Heritage Farms
- Board's Eye View
- 8 hours ago
- 2 min read
Heritage Farms is a solitaire and two-player game from Galen's Games; part of the same 'mint tin' series as Dice Clash, which we featured earlier this year. It's themed around the classic logic puzzle of the fox, chicken and corn. In the logic puzzle, the farmer is trying to cross a river in a boat that can only accommodate two items but the fox can never be left unsupervised with the chicken nor the chicken with the corn...
In Galen McCown's Heritage Farms, there are two farms on opposite sides of the river and, perversely, each has to get their goods to markets that share locations with the other's farms. The farmers can only take one item on board their boat; however farmers can supervise each other's goods. This isn't a cooperative game tho' - both players are trying to be the first to get two complete sets of chickens, corn and foxes across the river.
When you transport any goods to a market you will be able to leave them unattended if your opponent still has a farmer in situ there but if they move their farmer then all the goods at that location (both the farm and the market) will be at risk: a chicken in my market would gobble up the grain on my opponent's farm and a fox on their farm would then devour my chicken. We can each only afford to lose two goods; lose a third and you lose the game.
When you move a farmer from a market to which you've moved you can claim the bonus token at that location. It's the productive use of these that's likely to contribute most to who wins and who loses. In the solitaire version you are playing with another farmer whose choice of what to move is determined by a token and the roll of a four-sided die indicates where their farmer will be moving from.
As if the game wasn't already a tough enough puzzle, you can shake it up by incorporating poison corn and zombie chickens! These survive being eaten but they instead kill what tries to eat them...
Tho' it's a puzzler, Heritage Farms plays quickly. Win or lose, games are likely to be over in around 15 minutes.