Designed by: Ralf zur Linde,Wolfgang Sentker
In Finca you play the part of fruit suppliers on the island of Mallorca. Gather fruit and deliver! It couldn’t be that tricky, could it?
Well, the rules to Finca are simple enough. The board shows the island itself, broken into regions that each want certain types of fruit/s delivered to them. Outside of that is the windmill: where players place their farmers at the start of the game, and move them during it. This windmill is the game, essentially: on your turn you either move a farmer around it to collect fruit, or make a delivery instead. When you move your farmer you must move as many spaces as there are farmers on your starting space. Wherever you stop, you collect the fruit indicated on that space: and you collect as many fruit as there are farmers on that space, so stopping on a crowded area is more productive.
Passing the 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock spaces on the windmill will also get you a donkey token, and these are used to deliver. When you have the fruit you need, you pay a donkey token back to the bank, as well as the fruit you’re delivering, and then take the delivery tile from the board and put it in front of you – the number on the tile is the points you’ll score at the end of the game!
At the bottom of each pile of delivery tokens is a majority token: when this is revealed whoever has delivered the most fruit of that type earns the points on it.
Play continues until a certain amount of regions (depending on player count) have been emptied of their tiles, and scores are counted up.
Not much. You'll be busy with your own plans, and although damage to them is possible, it would be an unusual game where you found yourself stumped for options.
Low to moderate, depending on how many players and who's playing.
There's some light scorching here. The rules are simple but imposing a plan on them can be tricky - especially with more than two (see Sam says/Joe Says).
Tiles supply some variety but the essence of the game is that windmill. How much you enjoy that puzzle will dictate how much replay value Finca has.
2-4
Players
8+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Well, I really enjoy the puzzling aspect of that windmill, which reminded me a little of mancala type games such as Gold West or Trajan. We played with just two of us though, and I can really see that with more players this would start to feel chaotic: like another puzzly game, Bullfrogs, Finca is at its best as a head-to-head: as the player count increases, any control you have diminishes exponentially! Which in one way is a shame as it has a real family vibe to it with those piles of coloured wooden fruit. But in another if you're looking for a good but reasonably light two-player game, Finca is a delight.