Bohnanza!

While in France, Melissa and I taught my mom and her husband to play Bohnanza!, the über-popular game from Germany. We had never opened our copy, which we bought after our friends Pavel and Kathleen introduced it to us. (We had to re-learn the rules as we taught it.)

The quick-paced game has a simple set-up: You have "bean fields" (two to three spots in front of you), and you plant "beans," cards with clever artwork that portray different types of beans—soy beans show a bean in farmer's garb, chili beans(?) sport a devil-like flaming bean lighting a cigar over spilled gasoline, and so forth. Each field can only hold one type of bean at a time. You trade for advantageous beans and harvest your bean fields throughout the game, cleaning them out and collecting more or less coins depending on the number of beans in the field. The player with the most coins at the end wins the game.

Despite the chance element of a shuffled deck of cards, the game requires a light amount of strategy because you must play the cards in the order you receive them. Since you must plant at least one bean on each turn, you often find yourself harvesting a bean field before it's reached its maximum value, even if you have cards elsewhere in your hand that would increase its worth.

But the fun comes from the trading. Beans have a certain objective worth based on their frequency in the deck, but that goes out the door in the face of a subjective value. There may be zillions of wax beans in the deck, but if a player needs one for another coin because s/he knows that a harvest is coming, they might be willing to give up a lot in exchange. (You plant all the beans you received when you finish trading) "How valuable would it be to you...exactly?" "You could really use this card; it would give you another coin." You can also donate cards to other players, getting nothing in return but preventing a bean field uprooting. The table top chatter reveals casual manipulative streaks, strategies, and desperation.

Bohnanza! is a social game, with fortunes shifting around the table as players harvest their fields. In the games we played I thought that I was keeping discreet silence about how well I was doing, only to discover at the end of the game that I had lost. Our scores were in the mid-to-high teens, so a few points here and there can make a difference. Now that we've rediscovered it, we'll be sharing it with whatever game-playing friends we can scare up (why do most of you live so far away?)