Bohnanza

Bohnanza is a set collection, hand management card game all about trading and planting beans. It might come as a surprise to discover that Bohnanza was designed by Uwe Rosenberg (10 years before he created Agricola, Le Havre, Caverna and many other ‘bigger’ games). However, despite being overshadowed by those weighty titles, this card game still provides clever, fun mechanics and punches above its weight for a game that has been around for more than 20 years. Bohnanza’s deck consists of many different types of bean. Players (up to seven) will be aiming to plant beans of the same type in one of their two ‘bean fields’, and eventually harvest them to earn coins. Once the deck has been exhausted three times, the player with the most money wins. On your turn you have to play a bean card from your hand into one of your two available bean fields. Only beans of the same type can be played into one field, so if you have to play a different (third) type of bean other than those in your fields on your turn, you must first harvest one of your fields. Players can purchase a vital third bean field for three coins, giving them more flexibility. Bean types earn you differing amounts of coins, depending on how many beans you are harvesting at the time (some beans are rarer than others, and therefore worth more coins for having fewer of them, and vice versa for more common beans). On the reverse of every card is one coin. Harvesting your beans for coins? Simply flip over the appropriate value of cards of those harvested beans to keep for yourself, while the others return to the discard pile. This means, therefore, that there are now less beans of your just-harvested type available when the discard pile is shuffled and becomes the new deck later on. There is a really neat twist in Bohnanza, and it kicks in as soon as the initial cards have been dealt out to everyone. Players can look at but not rearrange their hand of cards. They must always play their top card, and any cards they acquire go to the back of their ‘queue’. Therefore, players need to be clever about how they ‘rearrange’ their order of cards… On your turn you can vocally offer to trade any cards in your hand with the other players. Therefore you could get rid of beans you don’t want and receive ones you do – but be careful, you could be gifting big points to other players! Of course, you may have no choice, because you might want to avoid being forced into harvesting one of your bean fields before you want to, if your next card is a type you’re not collecting! Bohnanza is an unsung hero from Uwe Rosenberg’s collection of board games. It takes strong willpower not to rearrange your hand (like you would in literally any other card game!), but that’s the brilliant thing about it. Believe us, it makes for a lot of fun when it comes to desperate trading of cards! Player Count: 2-7 Time: 45 Minutes Age: 13+