Board Game Arena

In general, I would rather not ban cards that are "too strong" (without looking at a reasonable data set anyway), but definitely those that are annoying to play against. For all the reasons other people have said, the most annoying cards are:

Little Peasant
Work Certificate


So I would ban those two now.

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As for cards that are "too strong"? IMO there are a lot of "too strong" cards (circumstantially) in Agricola. It's why we draft, right?
From behind the veil of ignorance (not knowing if I'm the one opening the particular card), do I think Agricola is a better or more interesting game without cards as powerful as Trade Teacher or Beer Table? Not really. They're both strong, but by themselves they're not really game-winning against strong opponents and have some counter-play. They're both on a much lower power-level than the banned Caravan, for example.

As for "Surprise" VP Cards? I would hate Agricola if it didn't have some of them. Part of the fun of Agricola is never really being sure if your lead will last through the final scoring. So I like there being a few potential 6-8-point surprise VP cards. I think we're in a good place for those, currently.

-Marick

marick wrote: ↑06 October 2022, 23:32 As for cards that are "too strong"? IMO there are a lot of "too strong" cards (circumstantially) in Agricola. It's why we draft, right?
From behind the veil of ignorance (not knowing if I'm the one opening the particular card), do I think Agricola is a better or more interesting game without cards as powerful as Trade Teacher or Beer Table? Not really. They're both strong, but by themselves they're not really game-winning against strong opponents and have some counter-play. They're both on a much lower power-level than the banned Caravan, for example.

I'm usually in that camp, which is also why I would rather not ban beer tables. I do find trade teacher ludicrous though, stronger than begging student.

I do see him being misplayed a ton by lower ranked players though (Not prioritizing the hearth enough, trying to setup a baking game..). I think the key to break him is to :
- Use it early with a hearth for very good food tempo
- Use it middlegame to setup breeding for crazy good food engine
- Use it late game as a free grocer, fully taking advantage of your crazy good food engine

No part of that plan is particularly hard to do, nor is it prone to counter-play. It may not be an auto-win the way a huge day labor combo might be but it still does way too much for a single card.

As for the actual ban suggestions, I will echo the majority opinion : Trade teacher, Work cert and little peasant.

I think its time to ban treeguard,

Its no fun like little peassant/Big Country. And there are a lot of games you cant do anything about it.

Do ban list changes move faster than bug fixes?

3 of the top voted bugs concern Sheep Walker, were all raised 1.5 years ago and have been consistently ruining games since then.

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=55034
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=55135
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=57838

flying_halflings wrote: ↑13 June 2023, 17:46 Do ban list changes move faster than bug fixes?

3 of the top voted bugs concern Sheep Walker, were all raised 1.5 years ago and have been consistently ruining games since then.

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=55034
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=55135
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=57838

The devs for Agricola are well aware of this and would like to correct it--but have thus far been unable to do so.

The implementation is remarkably accurate and stable. I agree this would be nice to get corrected, but it's not for lack of care or attention that this hasn't been resolved, but due to the difficulty of the issue in fixing it.

On the other hand, updating the banlist is relatively straightforward (as are many other bugs the game has had) and they do all get fixed rapidly. The fact that virtually every other bug or issue has been corrected rapidly in BGA Agricola's history should tell you that they are on top of these things and support this implementation very well, and that the Sheep Walker thing really is that troubling.


As for the actual banlist, I think overall the game is at a very good spot. I also really dislike Tree Guard personally, but I'm not convinced it is ban worthy.

The only card at this point that very well may be too strong is Teacher's Desk--there may well be reason to ban it. I'd love to get the actual stats back on it if we could, but not sure when/if that will happen.

I also have an increasing suspicion that Collector is possibly too good also, but given that's such a high skill card to exploit I'm not sure it matters or is warping the competitive play of the game in any meaningful way such that a ban would be warranted at the present time.

Hello everyone!
First of all I apologize in advance for my bad english, it's not my first language, I also hope this is the right place to post this suggestion.
With the expanding card pool and the recent bannings, in my most recent arena games (draft 7/8 occupation+minors) I have noticed the following:
-Some strategies have become a little bit too niche, it's sometimes hard to find missing pieces of a combo for some cards that are not very good otherwise.
-Things like plow support are a little bit inconsistent due to the high variance that comes with the huge number of new cards (which is not necessarely a bad thing, I'm just pointing that out).
-This is the most important point: the seventh and eighth pick of the draft are sometimes meaningless, expecially if you are an average to good player.
I think this happens because of the existence of certain cards that the more skilled players instantly recognize as completely unplayable, I am talking about cards like "sequestrator", "loudmouth", "cookery outfitter" and such.
Sometimes you find yourself choosing between one of these very bad cards and another playable card or even between two almost completely unplayable cards, and it doesn't feel like a choice at all.
Also, the strategy component related to "which cards are coming back when the pack comes back" is heavily reduced, you are rarely going to find something useful even if you can understand what other people are drafting.
In my opinion, this is something worth thinking about.
My suggestion is to remove the most unplayable 4-6 cards. I am not talking about cards that have a niche, fun role and are not always playable, I am talking about the worst of the worst.
I would ban cards with the lowest possible win rate that are unplayable in 99.99% of the circumstances (like the aforementioned "sequestrator", "loudmouth", maybe stuff like "growing farm") and are just dead weights in the draft.
I think this could improve draft quality and give players the chance to make more meaningful decisions regarding their 7th and 8th picked occupations and minors.

Ranior wrote: ↑16 June 2023, 14:29 The devs for Agricola are well aware of this and would like to correct it--but have thus far been unable to do so.

The implementation is remarkably accurate and stable. I agree this would be nice to get corrected, but it's not for lack of care or attention that this hasn't been resolved, but due to the difficulty of the issue in fixing it.

On the other hand, updating the banlist is relatively straightforward (as are many other bugs the game has had) and they do all get fixed rapidly. The fact that virtually every other bug or issue has been corrected rapidly in BGA Agricola's history should tell you that they are on top of these things and support this implementation very well, and that the Sheep Walker thing really is that troubling.

Yes overall the implementation of Agricola on BGA is fantastic and if my message came off as too terse it's because I just had a game crash with that bug.

And I misunderstood the ban list: So it's just the "competitive"/Arena option and Sheep Walker would still exist under other game options.

What I was getting at was if this game crashing bug has been around for 1.5 years then simply removing the card from the game might be the best option.

Obviously I would preference that this could be fixed but as I understand it plenty of other revised cards were not actually implemented based on coding difficultly.

-

Ban Animal Reeve

Animal Reeve
If there are still 1/3/6/9 complete rounds left to play, you immediately get 1/2/3/4 wood. During scoring, each player with 2+/3+/4+ animals of each type gets 1/3/5 bonus points

The main issue is that it has too many points on it. There are two ways it is played and I think both of them are problematic:
1. Played early. It requires everyone to drop whatever plan they had and fight for those 5 bonus points. If you have drafted a game plan around something else, you are screwed.
2. Played late. If this is drafted early it can be played in R14 as a surprise 5 points. If you are the only one who knows about the card it is enough if you actively deny your opponents one type of animal and then it doesn't matter if they are going for a farming strategy.

I think the card would be fine if it was tweaked (like 1/2/3 points instead of 1/3/5, or if it was required to be played in stage 1), but since we are not changing cards on BGA I think it should be banned.

As we've got some games in with the newest set of Alpha cards now, it's probably a good time to start formalizing some of the talks I've seen happening regarding what should be banned in this set.

To me, there are 3 tiers of ban considerations in these cards. I don't feel like writing out all the reasons right now, so this is more to start the discussion on this thread instead of just friendly chat during games about it.

ACKNOWLEDGED BY PUBLISHER AS BANWORTHY:
Writing Chamber

INSTA BAN, IMO:
Estate Master
Craft Brewery
Craft Teacher
Chapel
Pulverizer Plow
Summer House

LET'S AT LEAST THINK ABOUT IT:
Forest Clearer
Artisan District
Acquirer
Lazybones
Autumn Mother
[edit #1] Weakling
Collector <-- really has a lot more dangerous combos now

Maybe a few others that I'm forgetting right now for Tier 3, but passing through the list of ABCD in progress and my knowledge of E from Play-Agricola, this seems like my list.