Harvest Is a Bounty of Board Game Fun

Harvest originally came out in 2017 from the now-defunct Tasty Minstrel Games, which published it as a small-box game despite its medium complexity. Tasty Minstrel went out of business in 2021, leaving a number of great games in publishing limbo, although we’ve seen Orléans (Capstone), Yokohama (Synapses), and Gold West (Trick or Treat) come back into print in the last year or so. The new version of Harvest came out last year from Keymaster Games, which gave the game a real redesign to make it a larger-box title, with a better board and overall table presence, along with some improvements to the rules and mechanics to create a farming-themed board game that is actually fun.
Agricola has long been the gold standard among farming-themed games, unless you’re partial to its successor, Caverna, which has a lot of the same mechanics but is just Much More. Both games introduce a fair amount of stress to gameplay because you have to feed your family at the end of certain rounds or lose a significant amount of points, and setting up some kind of engine to provide food regularly is difficult—and that’s before you start trying to figure out how to get enough points to win. Agriculture may be work, but this is board gaming. We are here to have fun. Well, most of us are, at least.
The new version of Harvest does that, in spades—pun intended. It’s also a worker-placement game, where over the course of four rounds, you’ll place your three wheelbarrows into the four areas of the common board so you can buy seeds, gain water or fertilizer, plant/tend/harvest crops, or clear your fields and/or build buildings for new actions and points. There is still tension involved, but no one is starving, and the simplicity of the board means that it’s hard not to get something growing.