After Shock: No Agricola

So I waited until the deadline day to volunteer to teach Agricola. at the Nuke Con After Shock 2008.3, which was Tuesday, and the rest of the week found some free time to reread some of the rules, dig through the cards as there were still some I hadn't seen before, type up some notes, and Friday night re-watched the Board Games with Scott video on Agricola.
And no one signed up.
I even for a while put my cool jars of bits up on the sign up counter for enticement, but no takers. Oh, well.
I joined a few others in a cooperative game of A Touch of Evil, The Supernatural Game instead. We played cooperatively, and we creamed the bad guy. I even got in the last punch. But, honestly, the other three really, REALLY weakened the monster before my puny dice rolls got into play. He had twenty-two wounds to take, and by the time it was my turn to charge, he was down to just a couple wounds.
I also played Pandemic, three player, twice. We lost big time first, and won big time the second time. Both games seemed really unbalanced, but in opposite ways. It just depends on where the cards lay.
Also learned and played for the first time la Harve, created by the same designer who did Agricola. Very nice game, like Agricola in many ways, resource gathering, planning ahead, many steps to some things you want to do or buy, and victory points. Different in that there are way more resources, each resource can 'level up', actions are played on buildings that you or the town buy and then anyone can use (usually for pay) the building to do the action the building provides. The three guys I played with had all played together a few times, and were very kind to the beginner. I got a score that they said was in par with their first plays, so I wasn't too disappointed, and their scores were the highest they'd ever gotten, which I'd like to take a little credit for. ;p There are many buildings to come out, and since every building had victory points, I was trying to buy as many as possible, and the guys didn't mention 'till the end that usually all the buildings don't get bought, I just assumed we all try to buy the better buildings and keep buying 'till they're gone! Very fun and intricate game. The resource refreshing is random every game, and the number of players definitely would change how the game goes. There's only seven total actions in each round (and you feed after every round), so in a four player game, someone only gets one action per round. Some of the things that happen at round end, ie how much to feed, when buildings and ships come out, if there is a harvest or not, these things all change depending on the number of players as well. I do think it had 1-5, so it must have a solo element as well. I don't think I need to buy this one, yet, but only because I think we have many more games of Agricola in store at home before bringing this one home. I would like to play it a few more times though! I'm not sure if it's out in the US yet, we played from an Australian version picked up at Essen.