Finca Review

boardgamequest.com:

My first play of Finca came in 2018 at BGG CON. It was one of those rare out-of-print titles folks “in the know” fawned over. At that time used copies were selling for outrageous prices and, despite being a nearly 10-year-old game at that time, it was regularly checked out of the convention library.

Well, now Finca is widely available in this reprinted edition from Pandasauras games. With new art including a wonderful cover from Vincent Dutrait, you can have your very own copy for under $30. But was it just the collector mentality and FOMO that hyped Finca up for so long? Or is there a great game to go along with it?

In Finca players will be gathering goods to deliver to the hungry citizens of Mallorca. The board is separated into 10 different regions, each with a stack of request tiles and a finca tile (which will score when all the requests are fulfilled). Only one request for each region is face-up at any given time and once that tile gets fulfilled the next one will become available.

The goods themselves are gathered by moving your farmer tokens clockwise around the windmill blades. During setup, players will place their farmers on any blade they wish and gain one of those goods. However, once the game starts farmers can only move clockwise and must move a number of spaces exactly equal to the number of farmer meeples on the windmill space they start on. When they land, they will gain whatever resources equal to the number of farmer meeples on that space. So if you land on a lemon space with 4 meeples, you gain 4 lemons.

You can’t just hoard all the lemons on the island though. If ever a player needs to collect more of a resource than is in the supply, all players must return all of their goods of that type to the supply, and then the active player will get all their goods for the turn.

There is also a donkey shown on each side of the windmill. Each time your farmer meeple crosses that line, you gain a donkey cart. These carts can be used to deliver goods to