Bohnanza- To Bean or Not to Bean!

After that short little tip on photographing fireworks, I;m back again with a game review. This time an introduction into negotiation based games.

Bean planting might be the most boring/blandest theme a game could have right? Well not true, really this game is a very light negotiation game, that can generate a lot of noise!

I saw this game on the shelves of Brew Ha ha couple of years ago and thought that I should give this a try. My brother was in Singapore later that year and I asked him to get this game as this wasn't that expensive to get.

This game again is a lot of fun with a mid-sized group, say between 5-7, even though 2-7 players can play. This is a light game and is a very good game to get people into negotiation based games like Modern Art, Traders of Genoa, Ra etc.

Being a light game, everyone in the family can join in and have fun!

Bohnanza by- Uwe Rosenberg


Now this guy is another prolific game designer, some sort of a genius! He is a German game designer. He became known mainly through his card game Bohnanza, which is successful both in Germany as internationally.

He also designed Agricola, a game that dethroned Puerto Rico as the #1 game on BoardGameGeek.com. Rosenberg first began to occupy himself with the development and mechanisms of games during his school years. During that time, he published a number of play-by-mail games, some of which are now available at www.omido.de. When he was a student, Amigo published his best-known game, Bohnanza. Since finishing his statistics studies in Dortmund (the subject of his thesis was "Probability distributions in Memory"), his main occupation is the development of games. (Wikipedia)

What do you get in the Box?

Cards, Cards and Cards. You get 161 cards!

• 154 Bean Cards (the box comes with 11 different bean varieties in differing quantities)
• Seven 3rd Bean field cards

The art works looks nice and the version I have is from Rio Grande and hence quality impeccable!

How does this play?

Well, I haven't mentioned much about the game play throughout as I wanted to keep that completely in this section. Perhaps this is very different to other games that I have reviewed.

• Each player gets a hand of 5 cards- but the most important aspect of this game and in fact the factor that makes this game different is that players should not change the order of the cards that they have received or receive in the future!
• Each card has a number on the left hand side that tells players how many cards of that variety exists and at the lower part of the card a conversion table for harvest is given. i.e. if you harvest 3 bean cards of a particular variety, you get 1 gold coin.
  
• While I told you that this game has just bean cards, all the cards have a gold coin symbol on the back side and hence very neatly manufactured components
• Players try to plant bean cards (2 varieties if they don't have the 3rd bean field card, which costs 3 Gold), harvest it and make profit! That's it!

On their turn the following things happen:

• Players must plant bean cards (one or 2) from the top of their hand
• Draw 2 more cards from the pile, plant, donate or negotiate a deal (this my friends ROCKS)
• All players plant the traded/donated cards
• Finally the player draws 3 more cards from the pile and puts it at the back of the hand of cards again to maintain the order. However when you are negotiating, you can bring out the cards from your hand (but remember, you can't put it up the table, you can just call it out for negotiations and finally when someone trades, you them the cards) This is an interesting tactic that can change the order of cards to suit your convenience.
  

Well the entire fun part of the game is in the negotiation phase, where things really hot up, voices reaching the top of your roof, people screaming to close a deal and this is fun!

How long does this play?

Well typically the game suggests that you play 3 rounds (one round is when draw pile empties). After each round the size of the pile reduces as the gold that you make is the bean card turned over. So a full game should take you about an hour. But I play just one round and stop it (have reasons for this), which takes about 20-30 min.

Who would you recommend it to?

Well, here is where I have some reservations about this game. Yes, the negotiation part is fun, chaos, but becomes repetitive and soon people get into a rut to close deals faster that takes the charm out of this game. After the 1st few rounds the group more or less tends to close deals rather than extend the negotiation long and hard. Hence I play just the one round and would suggest all of you out there to try out a few rounds or a game or two and then decide to buy this. This game of course comes with tons of expansions so may have replayability. As I haven't played any, I wouldn't be able to judge that aspect.

Any Downsides?

I've actually mentioned the downside above and this to me is the greatest downside. Uwe created this game when he was at school, so lot of young people may find it very good, but if you are a serious gamer, I will surely not recommend this.

Final Thoughts!

As I mentioned before, this is a very good family entertainer, meaning parents with children can have a lot of fun. Or non-gamers/occasional gamers can play it during a party to get some excitement going. If you are a serious gamer, I would say stay away from it as Uwe has master pieces like Agricola, Le Havre that you will enjoy.