Farms Race (2024) is a farming-meets-communist-revolution board game from Medium Brow Games designed by Daniel Dranove and Tom Weiner, with art by Michael Zhang. It sells itself as a parody of games like Catan, with generally positive reviews (such as an average of 7.8 across 186 ratings on Board Game Geek, with a median score of 8) and generally seems to deliver. Comments note similarities to games like Catan, as the game designers intended, but also to games like Risk, when talking about its abilities to invade others and use nuclear bombs. When I played this (without having looked at these reviews in advance), Catan and Risk were also the first games that came to mind for me. But unlike most of the reviews, I’m not sure if I mean that in a good way.
Take resource generation. In Catan, you gain resources from hexes you are adjacent to. In Farms Race, you gain resources from tiles you directly inhabit (i.e., are on). Okay, Catan definitely requires more thought about why you would choose a certain hex or intersection, but maybe this is fine. It admittedly makes combat more straightforward, so I see it as justifiable. In Catan, however, the hexes that generate are created by a combination of dice rolls, combinatorial probability, and variation in probability across hexes that produce the same resource. In Farms Race, all resources produce at an equal rate, and all hexes of the same type produce at once. This may sound small, but it actually makes it so easy to get resources that it fundamentally undermines this as a potentially strategic aspect. Farms Race similarly changes from a d6 combat system in Risk to a d3 system, with similar results where it oversimplifies outcomes. Almost every major mechanic is like this.
This is really interesting to me, because while a game can have copyrights to things like the game board design or names of mechanics and abilities, and even the rulebook that describes mechanics as a piece of art, you cannot copyright the mechanics themselves. I’m not trying to encourage intellectual theft here, as I personally would still consider directly copying mechanics to be intellectual property theft. I’m just saying that, as a matter of law, you cannot copyright a game mechanic. (For more information on this, YouTuber and intellectual property lawyer Devin Stone, a.k.a. Legal Eagle, has a wonderful video on copyright law as it applies to gaming in light of Wizards of the Coast’s attempted changes to the Dungeons & Dragons Open Game License, which talks about what is and is not copyrightable in a game extensively.) This would indicate that this was not a decision to avoid legal troubles, but rather an active choice to change mechanics.
I think this is where we need to once again discuss this game as a parody. Now, using games as a form of satire and parody can work. Monopoly is a cutting critique of capitalism, while Helldivers 2 parodies American militaristic ideals. And maybe, if the goal was to parody games like Catan and Risk, these mechanical changes would make sense. But I’m not sure it actually succeeds.
When I described Farms Race as a “farming-meets-communist-revolution board game”, some of you probably could already tell what this was referencing: Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell, a satirical critique of authoritarianism within communist regimes. This game is unashamed in how it takes ideas from Animal Farm, to the point where the pigs are the only animals in the art depicted in officers’ uniforms. (For those who haven’t read Animal Farm, the pigs start running the supposedly communist titular farm and start wearing human clothes – and specifically military uniforms – as a symbol of their superiority). But it also contrasts this awkwardly with some of the other imagery. For instance, the art of the rabbits features the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). This creates an awkward dichotomy where, rather than parodying games like Catan and Risk, it seems to parody Animal Farm. It seems to treat the mechanical aspects taken from other games carelessly, while putting in so much effort to the details in the Animal Farm-inspired aspects that it only seems sarcastic to include explicit Monty Python references alongside it. Now, I’m not saying that Animal Farm is without its issues. It’s fair to critique it. But based on things like the description of the game, I don’t think this was the intent, which is why it comes off so sloppily.
Mechanically, it is at best a careless knock-off of other, much more widely known and more successful games. And intellectually, it ostensibly wants to be a parody of other games but appears to instead parody an important piece of literature entirely by accident. By struggling in both areas, it delivers on neither.
Who would I recommend this game for? If you wish Catan had nukes, this game might be for you. If you enjoy Risk but don’t want to commit to spending a whole day on a game, this game also might be for you. But in either case, I would try to find a copy for borrow at a library or that you can play at a cafe or something before buying your own. You might enjoy it, but due to how badly it handles mechanics, I wouldn’t commit to paying for a copy first. Overall, this was a decent premise but with extremely poor execution on all fronts.