Tiny Farms (2020)

Overview

Tiny Farms is a fun and engaging family-friendly roll-and-write game. Tiny Farms features a simple but unique dice rondel with shared pawns that you will use to collect animals for your farms.

Each player is a farmer managing two 4x4 farms. On a turn, animals are drafted and placed on the farm by writing their initials (or by drawing, if you're feeling creative). Drafting involves a special rondel with eight sections containing the animals. The rondel is overlayed by a wheel with different hole patterns — the patent-pending Rolldel Wheel-o-Matic! — that reveal only two animals in each section. As the wheel rotates, different animals will be available. One red and one blue meeple travel clockwise around the rondel.

Each round, roll dice equal to the number of players, plus one. Players then take turn drafting a die, moving either the red or blue farmer meeple that number of sections, and placing the two animals from that section onto their farm that matches the color of the farmer. The last die remaining after all players have taken one is used to rotate the wheel.

Players also start with some milk tokens that can modify the values of dice by ±1.

The game ends after ten rounds (with your farms hopefully now being full), and players score points. Each animal has a different scoring conditions, such as sets of adjacent animals of the same kind or different kinds, or the most animals of a kind between all players. You also get points for unused milk tokens, and lose points for any size difference between your two farms.