Dave Reviews: When Chickens Became Oxen

Spirits of the Rice Paddy

In preparation for this review, I learned that the conical hat worn by rice farmers in China is called a douli. Of course, those hats exist in many other Asian countries, and have different names in each. There are also English names, but we're going to leave certain ones aside for very good reasons.

Spirits of the Rice Paddy is like Farming Simulator, played with cardboard and set in old-school China. Your board is your field; you start with one of ten fields planted and fenced off, with five others ready for planting and the last four full of rocks you need to clear in order to use them. Planted rice grows the next season, when it can be harvested and sold at market for the money you need to keep the place running. Of course, if your crops are diseased or loaded with bugs, they won't sell for nearly as much.

Most of the farming is done by workers you hire. You start with ten and can hire ten more at increasingly absurd rates; the last couple must be proper supervisors, considering they don't actually add more than the other workers but cost several times as much. You also buy livestock which can do work (oxen clear fields, for example, while geese eat bugs that can infest your crops). It's important to note that you're buying livestock, not certain types of livestock. These come on flippable tokens, with an ox on one side and a goose on the other. You can only have six livestock max, but they transform into whichever one you need, which sounds like the way to push back against factory farming in America. (That's a joke, of course. If you buy/hire more than one thing at the end of each round, you get charged a tax that no corporate farm will ever have to pay!)

There are also spirits you can call upon to help. They're not hard to find or use; apparently they need something to do as much as the workers you hire. These spirits are not designed to have approximately equivalent power levels. The higher the number on the spirit card, the stronger it is, but the later it might make you go in turn order (which is determined by the highest number spirit card each player has). Even so, the higher-number ones are sometimes so good you just want to get them on the table ASAP and deal with going last or second-last. That's saying something because a farm only works if it has water, and turn order decides who gets it.

At the start of each round, a rain card is flipped up which determines how much water is available for the season. All of it goes to the first player. That player releases whatever water he or she needs to get rid of (can't plant or harvest a soaked field), which filters down to players in turn order. Once the planting/harvesting is done, the new water comes through. Players near the top of the turn order get basically whatever they need; those near the bottom might have very nice spirits helping them, but they'll need to manage their water much more carefully to avoid rotting fields.

The theme of this game is great if you need to relax while thinking very hard during your entertainment hours. There's no reason to cuss out your workers or your oxen; they all do their jobs perfectly well, so if things go wrong, it's because you bollixed it up. (Not that bollixing things up is relaxing, but it's easier to improve yourself than the performance of your cardboard.) The way you have every decision under your control—the shape and size of your fields, your work force, your livestock count, how to ration your water—gives a sense of having total control over the outcome, which makes it that much more of a wrench in the works (in a good way) when someone plays a spirit that brings the locusts upon your lands or convinces your workers to run away from home.

That said, the theme is really what carries the game. If you're 'meh' about rice farmers or pretending to hire a bunch of them, there may be a lot of equally good games that will better suit your tastes. It is, as is so often said in this space, a well-crafted game that entertains but does not rise above the crowd in a design sense. But if you like this aesthetic, you should have a good time.

Score: Ten happy workers out of thirteen workers on-site.