review

turn beans to gold

Bohnanza 20 Jahre

Ich glaub, wir feiern!

Beans working as a gold mine! Bohnanza! 20 years of Bohnanza! The basic game mechanism of the evergreen is described quickly: You have bean cards in hand, add beans to your hand in various ways, plant beans, swap beans, trade beans and, finally, harvest beans for gold. The allure of the game is in its details, which are - for absolute newcomers to the bean fields - quickly explained:

The game features several varieties of beans in varying numbers, the total number of cards for each variety is stated on every card for the variety. Each bean variety also shows a so-called Bohnometer, indicating the number of beans you must harvest to earn the corresponding amount of gold; the rarer a variety the more gold you earn with it.

 Depending on the number of players you have two or three bean fields laid out and are dealt five bean cards from the well-shuffled stack of bean cards. Attention! The cards you are dealt are taken up one by one and during the game you can never change the order of your cards in hand. Cards that are added to your hand are always stacked as the hindmost ones.

The active player MUST plant the first, foremost card from his hand, that is, place it on a free bean field or a field already holding the same variety. If you have now suitable field available, you can buy a third field or harvest a field. Then you MAY plant a second bean from your hand. Then you turn up two cards from the draw pile: When they are suitable for your own fields you can plant them; if not, you can trade with these cards or five them away! Only the active player is allowed to trade with other players, non-active players can never trade with one another. And you cannot do another trade with cards received in a trade. You can include cards from your hand in a trade deal and - only for such a purpose - take a card from another position than the foremost one in your hand. If you give away cards, the receiving player must accept the gift! Then, all players plant the beans they received or kept in the trading phase and must again, harvest a field before planting, if necessary, and take the resulting amount of gold, according to the Bohnometer of the variety; you turn over the resulting number of bean cards to the gold coin side, the rest of harvested beans is discarded. Then you draw three cards for your hand, one by one and placed in hindmost position. When the draw pile has been emptied three times, you harvest all your bean fields, receive gold according to the respective Bohnometers and then you win with most money.

In the Anniversary Edition, there is a new bean variety, Springbohne. At the start of the game players decide if they want to play with the old variety Gartenbohne or replace this variety with the new Springbohne variety. Springbohne has a Bohnometer that is different from all the other Bohnometers. If you harvest a field of Springbohne - minimum two beans - you discard all harvested cards and draw a number of cards equal to the number of players plus one from the draw pile. You choose one of those cards and plant it or discard it and hand the rest to your right neighbor, who selects a card, plants it or discards it and hands on the remaining cards, this is continued until the last card reaches the player who harvested Springbohne. He puts the card as gold on his coin stack.

Bohnanza is a neat, elegant gem among card games and has achieved the status of a classic that can be named in the same breath with Catan or Carcassonne. It offers an inimitably well-working mix of luck in drawing bean cards, necessity of good negotiation abilities and tactic in planting and harvesting beans. If you manage a bit of card memorizing on top of all that and remember how often the Augenbohne has already ended up on the discard pile, can maybe achieve a favorable deal, especially in the third go at the draw pile. And with a little bit of luck you can make lots of gold with a Springbohne harvesting, if you draw the necessary card to harvest your second field.

Dagmar de Cassan

Players: 3-5

Age: 10+

Time: 45+

Designer: Uwe Rosenberg

Artist: Björn Pertoft

Price: ca. 10 Euro

Publisher: Amigo Spiele 2017

Web: www.amigo-spiele.de

Genre: Cards, collect, trade

Users: With friends

Version: de

Rules: de

In-game text: no

Comments:

Rules unchanged

New bean variety for optional use

Compact box, easy to carry along

Compares to:

All editions of Bohnanza and all expansions

Other editions:

Currently none

My rating: 7

Dagmar de Cassan:

20 years! And still one of my most favorite games!

Chance (pink): 3

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 0

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 3

Interaction (brown): 2

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0