Sponsored.  Your gardens are offering up greater yields every season and the cows, chickens, and bees are keeping your family flush with milk, eggs, and honey.  There is even some surplus starting to crowd the pantry.  It seems like the perfect time to set up shop - your own farm shop, that is!  But it looks like a few of your neighbors have also had the same idea.  Will you be able to corner the market and become the go-to source for local produce?

In My Farm Shop, the new board game from Rüdiger Dorn (Istanbul), each player has a farm board featuring a set of ten fields, and a small farmer’s market stall to tend to.  On the surface it might look easy, but the demands of even the smallest farming operation go far deeper than the just harvesting fruits and veggies, milking cows, and sheering sheep.  You will need to carefully manage your crop selections, invest in field improvements, choose the best time to harvest, and keep a close eye on the other farmers to maintain a competitive edge.

Each field on your farm board features a basic default action, allowing a player to harvest a single egg, or pack one jar of honey – but that is just the beginning.  For your farm shop to succeed, improvements will need to be made, and this is where the My Farm Shop’s clever mechanics come into play.  Players’ turns are divided into two parts.  At the start of each turn, three dice are rolled and the active player chooses one die, using the value rolled to collect a field card from the central market, and then placing it over a numbered field on their farm board.  These field cards change what your farm board generates, allow you to exchange goods for coins, and may be either a permanent or one-time-use enhancement.

Field activation takes place during the second part of each player’s turn.  Once the active player has collected a field card and made an improvement to their board, the values of the remaining two dice are totaled up and every player can then activate the field corresponding to that number on their own farm board.  When a field is activated, all players activate their field of that number.  Thus, players must think carefully when choosing what field card to take from the market, as sometimes taking a less desirable card might be preferable to avoid granting greater advantages to other players.

Since all good farmers make sure they’re prepared for catastrophic losses, My Farm Shop also provides a way to keep your farm going strong even when the dice do not roll in your favor.  Burlap bags are a special production item gained from certain fields, which you can use to change the value of dice after they have been rolled.  If a die comes up a 3, for example, you could spend a burlap bag to count it as a 2 or 4; someone else may spend two bags and count it as a 1 or 5.  This makes burlap bags a useful tool to have among your supplies, especially since some fields require them to produce other items.  Fields can also produce sunflowers, which players can then assign to fields to increase their future yields.

The total number of field improvement cards that are available from the market is based on the number of players in a given game, and when they run out each player makes one final field activation before the game ends, ensuring that the tension remains high through the final activation.  Whoever has the most coins after the last field is activated wins!

And for more accomplished farmers, My Farm Shop offers a more challenging experience through double-sided game boards.  Flipping the boards to their back side allows for games where certain field improvements can be placed at the start of the game, introducing strategic planning even before the first turn kicks off.  My Farm Shop also features optional rules that add transportation and skills for your farmers, as well as special objectives that players can achieve to gain more coins as they work their farms.

My Farm Shop is a brilliant, deceptively simple game with easy to learn rules. With every roll of the dice, decisions are made that not only impact the active player, but all players – creating interesting and unique challenges every turn.  Players must consider their best options for field improvements, while keeping in mind what are likely to be the most common dice results.  The game accounts for dice odds as well, assigning special rules to field #7!

Strategic placement of field improvements to maximize production is key to gaining the most coins, and field cards that may at first appear attractive in the market may not grant the results you are looking for if your other fields are not producing the right, or right amount, of complementary goods.  Keeping in mind the storage capacity of your shop is also important since overproduction means wasted effort.

My Farm Shop is all about growing, making, and selling home-grown goods for profit –creating a refreshingly bucolic environment full of fun, fields, and friendly competition.  Pick up a copy today and let My Farm Shop transport you to simpler times!

Now available in the U.S. and Canada.  Visit www.pegasus-web.com to learn more about My Farm Shop and other fantastic games from Pegasus Spiele!