Agricola

Agricola Online Tournament

Agricola Season 16 Online
Tournament

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Overview & News

Season 16 Standings

As games end the standings are updated. See how each league is doing and check on your friends and rivals. You can see lifetime standings HERE.

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Tournament Results

Report Season 16 Agricola Online Tournament Game Results

Record the results at www.meepleleague.club

Game Assignments

Your Season 16 Game Assignments will be on www.meepleleague.club when the season starts. You should also receive an email from the GM. All the game assignments are available below when the season starts.

This Agricola league uses the online implementation of the Revised Edition of Agricola at www.boardgamearena.com. Games must be created with the Tournament mode setting (which just means the banned list used in most tournaments is implemented) and “Draft 7” will be used to distribute occupations and minor improvements from all 3 of the implemented decks: E, I, and K, though there are a few cards from the printed version of the game that have not been implemented  (see the article about online Agricola).

Be sure to name the game using the game name below and invite the other players listed. Any player may set up the game, but the winner of each game is responsible for entering the results using the form further down the page.

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Game Assignments

Sign Ups Closed for Season 16 of
Agricola Online Tournament

Sign ups for the next season will be available on:

bucketofdice.com

Make sure you have an account on:

www.bucketofdice.com

If you don’t already have one, create an account for the sign up system the Meeple League is using. Be sure to add your boiteajeux user name (and any others you have) to your account.

When you login you will see all the events open for sign up.

Players are sorted into groups of 7 players based on previous results.  In a season, each player plays in 4 games. Each other member of your group will be in 2 games against you. See scoring rules below.

Divisions are based on previous Season results. New players enter at the bottom level for their first season.

Our Agricola tournaments use the online implementation at www.boardgamearena.com. Drafting is used.

You’ll receive a notice in your email once the pairings are ready. If you do sign up, you are committing to checking the website a couple of times on most days (it’s OK if something comes up every once in a while, or if you’re out of town for a weekend (for example), but in general we’re hoping game lengths will be measured in weeks not months.

Previous Season Results

The results of the last season (15) are here. The overall standings are on a separate page. Please see the menu under Standings.

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Tournament Results

BPA Agricola PBEM Tournament 2020

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Player List
Game Assignments
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Standings

This is the home page for a Boardgame Players Association “Play By Email” tournament for Agricola for 2019-2020. It is open only to members of the Boardgame Players Association (BPA). It you attend the World Boardgaming Championship (WBC), and are up to date on your registration fees, then you are already a member. If not, you can purchase a “PBEM Membership” for $10 from this website: www.boardgamers.org. This tournament will award laurels and contribute to the annual Caesar award, all of which are tracked through that same website.

GM: Randy Buehler

Format

All games will be 4-player games using the tournament mode and draft 7 settings on boiteajeux.net (which uses the original version of the game, minus a few tricky-to-program EIK cards).

Heat Stage: Everyone who joins the event will play in 3 asynch games, which will launch simultaneously. They will be paired randomly within the constraint that we will do our best to avoid putting people into multiple games together. If you win any of your games, you advance to the playoffs.

Quarterfinal Stage: If more than 50 people enter the event then single winners from the heat stage will be entered into two quarterfinal matches each. Winning either earns advancement to the semifinals along with the double winners from the heat stage.

Semifinal Stage: You will be placed in 4 simultaneous asynch games. They will be seeded based on the results from the Heat Stage as much as possible (details will depend on the number of semifinalists who qualify). In addition, we will avoid giving anyone repeat opponents if possible.

You will be awarded 10 points for winning a game, 6 for finishing 2nd, 3 for 3rd, and 1 for 4th. The top 7 point-earners will advance to the finals, with heat performance serving as the first tiebreaker and percentage of winner’s score in the semifinals as the second tiebreaker (and from the heats as the 3rd tiebreaker).

(This stage will be eliminated if there are 7 or fewer heat winners.)

Final Stage: You will be placed into 4 simultaneous games and each of the other finalists will be in 2 of them. We use the same scale of points for each finish position as in the semifinals and the final standings go by these points. (Ties in the overall standings will be broken by semifinal points, then heat points, then % of winner’s scores in the finals, then semis, then heats.)

Note on Ties: We will not use the in-game tiebreakers for finish positions. In the heats and quarterfinals, anyone tied for 1st gets credit for a win. In the semis and finals the points for tied positions will be divided evenly among the tied players.

Pace of Play: You are expected to check your games and take your turns (at least) once per day. It’s OK to have an occasional break of a couple of days, but we expect most games to finish in less than six weeks. Games that haven’t finished in 2 months are likely to be adjudicated, and the adjudication will include demoting slow players to lower finish positions.

Platform

Games will be played on Boiteajeux.net using the Tournament Mode (aka, there is the usual banned list) and Draft 7 settings.

Schedule

Registration Opens: 9-13-2019

Registration Closes: 12-1-2019 

Heat Stage Began: December 13

(No Quarterfinal Stage)

Semifinals Began: April 15, 2020

Finals Begin: August 2, 2020

Game Results

As games end the standings are updated. See how each player is doing and check on your friends and rivals.

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Tournament Results

BPA Agricola Tournament
Report Results

The winner of each game should record the results, unless otherwise arranged. Use the form below.

If you have problems using the form on this page CLICK HERE TO SEE JUST THE FORM.

Game Assignments

Agricola Online Season 1 Report

Agricola Season 1 Wrap-Up

by Randy Buehler

Season 1 of the Agricola league was a smashing success, with the Meeple League’s largest turn-out for an online event so far and some great matches up and down the ladder. 77 players signed up to play, which meant 11 leagues spread across four divisions. I was the biggest winner, but by the narrowest of margins as I defeated Sceadeau d’Tela for the Division 1-A crown *on tiebreakers* (3 match wins to 2). Congratulations are also due to Bernt Nodland and Steven LeWinter, who won the two leagues in Division 2 and thus earned spots in the top division for season 2. (Steve’s win was particularly close with only 3 league points separating 1st from 4th in his league.) You can see all the standings HERE.

Season 2 is about to start, and the field has expanded to 96 competitors. That means there will be 7 leagues in division 4 and 14 leagues in total. Good luck to everyone as they try to win promotion, and have fun playing.

With season 1 in the books, I thought it would be interesting to see how accurate the initial seeds were. As you may recall, I did the initial player sort first by looking at BPA laurels and then at Elo ratings on boiteajeux. There has been some debate (bordering on trash talk) about how accurate Elo ratings are, and I saved a copy of everyone’s rating before the season began. I then looked at the absolute value of how far each player’s finish position was from the position that would be predicted by Elo or laurels. (In other words, if you had the 5th highest Elo in your league but finished 1st then you were 4 spots away from where you were predicted to be.)

Laurels did a significantly better job of predicting division 1 than Elo did (8 spots off in total versus 18), but in Division 2-A it was the other way around (20 spots off versus just 4). Meanwhile Division 2-B was close to a wash (12 off for laurels versus 10 off for Elo). If you add up all 3 leagues that included at least some players with laurels, Elo comes out looking a little better at 32 to 40 (or an average of 1.5 spots off per player versus 1.9). Meanwhile in Division 3 there were some major upsets, including division wins from each of the two lowest rated competitors, but Elo was a quite reasonable predictor if you ignore those two players (1.7 spots off per player, or 1.1 spots off per player if you ignore the two outliers).

One surprising fact about season 1 is that only one player managed to collect exactly a first, a second, a third, and also a 4th place finish. Ed Fear is apparently the Epitome of Average. Meanwhile the triple winners club included only 3 people and exactly one person managed to win all four of their games: William F, aka wsefranc, from league 4-D.

There were, unfortunately, some players who played too slowly in season 1. The vast majority of games were done by the end of March and I think that two-month timeline is what folks should see as acceptable (we started in the last few days of January). The truly unfortunate part of having a slow player is that they impact four different games. My only real recourse to deal with this problem is to tell those players they aren’t allowed to play in future Meeple League events, and while most of the slowpokes from season 1 did not choose to sign up again, I did decline one registration attempt for season 2. For the handful of matches which haven’t finished, I treated them as 4-way ties when determining promotion and relegation and I will add the real points to the lifetime standings page once they finally do complete.

All of which brings us to season 2, which has quite a few interesting storylines to follow. A few more well-known WBC ringers have entered the league now (Jon Senn, Eric Wrobel, Josh Cooper, Rob Kircher), but they will have to fight their way up from the bottom. Turambar will be the champion of the pro-Elo crowd as he joins Division 1 and is the only player there without a WBC pedigree. Rob Murray and Petri Savola barely missed getting themselves promoted to division 1 and will be trying to finish the job. Meanwhile Daniel Eppolito will have something to prove as he was a consensus pick to finish in the top 2 of division 1 according to the fantasy league participants, but instead got himself relegated to division 2. In my own case, Agricola has not historically been one of my best game but I have invested a lot of time in the last 18 months or so trying to bring my game up to a world class level. I don’t know if I’m there yet, but I will do my best to claim back-to-back titles.

I’m confident there are many other interesting stories around the players I’m not yet familiar with, but that’s the beauty of a league like this. As the seasons go by we’ll get to see who rises and who falls. Good luck to everyone, and have fun in season 2!

Online Agricola Announcement

Agricola Season 1 Sign-ups Closed

Reserve a Spot in Season 2 Below

The Meeple League recently announced our first online event – a league for Thurn & Taxis players – but we’re not done there. We’re also starting up an online Agricola league for those who like their Eurogames a little heavier. Agricola Cover

The format for all our leagues will be identical: players get grouped with 6 other players and put into 4 games (2 with each other player). Games will then be played asynchronously over the course of several weeks and a point system will be used to determine who wins the league (10 points for 1st, 6 for 2nd, 3 for 3rd, and 1 point for finishing last). Winning your league gets you promoted to a higher division for the next season, while finishing in the bottom 2 gets you demoted to an easier one. You can read the full rules for our league format HERE .

For folks who like a complex challenge, Agricola has proven to be one of the best board games ever made. It may not draw the biggest crowds on the tournament circuit, but it is legendary for its consistently shark-infested fields. When it was first published back in 2007 it led the Spiel des Jahres committee to invent a new category (for “complex games”) so it could award a special prize, and as of this writing in early 2017 it is still the #11 overall ranked game of BoardGameGeek.

We’ll be using the online implementation of Agricola on www.boiteajeux.net. Games will be created with the Tournament mode setting (which just means the banned list used in most tournaments is implemented) and “Draft 7” will be used to distribute occupations and minor improvements from all 3 of the implemented decks: E, I, and K, though there are a few cards from the printed version of the game that have not been implemented  (see the article about online Agricola). For season 1, we’ll be using BPA laurels in Agricola (see the Agricola Event History Page) to seed people into the initial divisions.

                If you want to Sign up for Season 2 Agricola, please fill out this form (this will also put you in as an alternate for season 1 in case someone fails to join their games):

[wpforms id = “967”]

 

A Quick Guide to Online Agricola

– Randy Buehler

The most popular place to play Agricola on the web is at boiteajeux.net. Games are typically played asynchronously, which means you check in a couple of times per day and see if it’s your turn yet. Since most people are in more than a couple of games at a time, it’s probably your turn in a couple of them. Overall, games can take anywhere from a few days to a few months to finish, and there’s nothing stopping you from playing games in real-time if you have a group that’s all online at the same time.

The biggest drawback to Boiteajeux is that not all the cards are included. Some cards were left out because they were tricky to implement (especially for asynch play), though almost all the cards from the E, I, and K decks do exist (aka – the decks that come with the game) and you could play for quite a while before even realizing anything was left out. Here’s a complete list of the cards from that are missing:

19 – Gypsy’s Crock
34 – Basket
38 – Madonna Statue
40 – Mini Pasture
58 – Animal Yard
68 – Harrow
70 – Punner
73 – Guest
97 – Slaughterhouse
117 – Greenhouse
125 – Broom
138 – Reed Hut*
339 – Pelts

Occupations
164 (4+) – Master Forester
169 (4+) – Storyteller
178 (4+) – Hut Builder
179 (1+) – Merchant
196 (1+) – Mushroom Collector
198 (3+) – Ratcatcher*
207 (1+) – Stablehand
208 (1+) – Stable Master
215 (4+) – Tenant Farmer
216 (4+) – Animal Keeper
223 (3+) – Harvest Helper
230 (4+) – Clay Digger
234 (3+) – Wood Buyer
237 (4+) – Juggler
239 (4+) – Corn Profiteer
251 (4+) – Reed Buyer
255 (4+) – Stone Buyer
260 (4+) – Taster*
261 (4+) – Outrider
263 (1+) – Fence Builder
269 (4+) – Acrobat
273 (4+) – Basin Maker
284 (1+) – Wood Distributor
289 (4+) – Countryman
299 (3+) – Slaughterman
301 (1+) – Wood Carver
307 (4+) – Animal Breeder
308 (4+) – Foreman
312 (1+) – Fence Overseer