Bohnanza
There’s a popular theory that the majority of engineering and cultural development occurs in cold countries because people have nothing else to do when trapped inside for eight months of the year. That may be true but it doesn’t quite explain why the Germans, of all their European brethren, are so damn good at game design. They can spend no more time indoors then your average Minnesotan yet they continue to produce not just incredibly clever games but games with mechanics so unique they rewrite your brain as you try to come to terms with them – such as Bohnanza, a game of card swapping and set collection by Uwe Rosenberg.
This card game seems unassuming enough, but belies its true, competitive nature. The game’s only distinguishing feature is the eclectic but (typically for a European game) pedestrian theme of bean harvesting (“bohn” being German for bean). But there’s a reason this game has developed such a passionate following world wide, inspired several spin-offs and tie-in products. And there’s a reason my friends’ eyes light up with an almost terrifying zeal when its name is mentioned around the game table.
Like most really clever games, Bohnanza is amazingly simple. The A5 box of 160 cards are simply sets of beans, from the ultra-rare cocoa bean (only 4 in the deck) to proliferous coffee beans (24 in the deck). Each card features this number so you can tell at a glance how likely they are to come up. Also on the card – beneath the amusing and endearing illustrations by Bjorn Perftoft – is a list of numbers beneath a pile of gold coins. The coins – 1 to 4 – represent the points generated by collecting the number of cards listed beneath the pile. Since coffee beans are so common, you need four to get one coin, but just two cocoa beans will net you three coins. Simple, and very clear.
What limits your card collecting is that you only have two “bean fields” in front of you and you can only plant one type of bean in each field. And there’s another kicker: at the start of your turn you must play the card at the “front” of your hand in one of your fields. And that’s the real trick that makes Bohnanza so special: it’s not about the cards in your hands so much as the order of those cards. So unless you want to constantly uproot your bean fields, you need to trade cards out to get the right cards to the front. This prevents one of the bugbears of trading games: everyone is motivated to sell, and hoarding cards just to keep them off others is always a bad idea.
The trading phase occurs after the planting of the first card. Two cards are turned over from the deck and the current player has to place them in his fields, trade them away, or give them away, if he gets desperate enough. Random, terrified acts of charity are sometimes the way of this game. Other players are more crafty or manage to be less panicked but it does have some of that crazy urgency of Billionaire/Bull Pit, and can get quite enjoyably shouty, as deals fly back and forth for coveted cards. With seven players – the suggested max, although I suspect eight or nine could work – you may want to warn the neighbors about the noise. Three player games, the minimum, are more tactical, but still fast and furious. Thus we have an excellent party game: flexible enough to accommodate a varying number of players, that plays in less than an hour and involves a surfeit of shouting.
And best of all, none of those qualities stops Bohnanza from being a thoughtful game of carefully weighing risks and options. The proportions never change but the right risk at the right time needs to be re-evaluated every time the cards are turned over, and every deal needs to be carefully considered based on who might be winning and how much of the game is left. But none of that prevents the game from being easy to learn or fun for almost everyone. Most everybody will find the unique mechanic of card shuffling thoroughly enchanting and find the deal-making extremely fun – whether they win or lose.
It also helps that the cartoon pictures of the beans are very cute. Indeed, the game is so family friendly that a recent edition had all the art replaced with pictures drawn by child fans of the game. This shows the love the game has engendered in young people all across Germany, and indeed, older people, and indeed, the world. It’s a reliable game, enjoyable to most everybody, and remains so time after time. It’s shouty fun and relentlessly cute and easy to learn, but it has a strategic depth and a sharp deal making edge to keep even the cleverest types interested. That’s a big package – and all with only beans. That’s some fine cooking – just in time for Christmas dinner.