Harvest: Designer Diary

This Design Diary is a guest post from Trey Chambers. 

 A New Sunrise

The original Harvest began with a goal: to fill an untapped niche in the market. Agricola, Uwe Rosenberg’s finest, has long been one of my all-time favorite games. Ask me any given day, and I might even put it at #1. But I felt that the hobby lacked a truly great medium-light farming game that packed something close to the punch of Agricola in a much shorter, simpler package. Thus unlike my other designs which either started with a theme or a mechanic, I set out to fulfill an objective.



Usually, it takes quite some time to develop a game before I pitch it to a publisher. I’m talking in terms of years, not months. With Harvest, once I had this clear goal in mind, the game put itself together very quickly. I took the tight worker placement tension of Agricola and combined it with a twist on the turn order mechanic from another favorite game of mine, Terra Mystica. Then I mixed in a theme from one of my favorite video games: Stardew Valley. Put that in a blender with mypenchant for asymmetry and voila, you have Pixel Farmer, which is what the prototype of Harvest was called.



I honestly don’t remember how I managed to snag a meeting with Tasty Minstrel Games at a GenCon many moons ago, but they pretty immediately wanted to publish it. It was by far my fastest turnaround time for a game, only taking about six months from idea to signing the contract. Development took a bit longer as we playtested and balanced Harvest to death. TMG set me up with the immensely talented Seth Jaffee (of Eminent Domain and Crusaders: Thy Will be Done fame) for this process. The result was a pretty universally loved game that also earned a Dice Tower Seal of Excellence from Tom Vasel himself.



Despite the praise and awards, Harvest never really took off like its sibling set in the same Gullsbottom universe, Harbour. Harvest did sell out of its printrun, but it took some time. In an industry always chasing the new hotness, it wasn’t fast enough to warrant a reprint. Fast forward many years and, as you might be aware, TMG folded. When this happened, I thought I would throw Harvest out there thinking that maybe a new publisher could give a proper reprint and maybe a big marketing push. I wholeheartedly believe that Harvest could be a premiere gateway worker placement game.

Enter Keymaster Games.

Actually, enter several publishers who expressed interest. In the end, I thought Keymaster would be the best fit given their other popular gateway title Parks. I made the right choice, working with them has been amazing. It wasn’t going to be as straightforward as I originally thought though.

Re-signing games like this can go one of two ways. Publishers can take the product directly to print, or it can be an opportunity to explore new potential. The folks at Keymaster went the route of testing out new ideas. This sent me down a path of developing a whole new game. For a little while, Harvest had an area control element where players had a communal farm and fought over harvesting. While this idea ultimately strayed too far from the original goal of the game, new ideas came from it. We brought Seth back on to support developing these new ideas, like making crops feel unique, and opening up the design to help create fun exploration moments for players with their character and farming combos. Keymaster pushed me to make the game better, and though it required a lot of time and work, in the end I’m glad they did. It took a lot of blood, sweat, and carpal tunnel, but I am very proud and pleased to present this new version of Harvest to the world!

A Bountiful Harvest

Now that we understand its beginnings, let’s take a look at the new version and what makes it great (and different) from the original game.

The Game Boards

The first obvious thing players will notice about this new version is the board. The original Harvest came with a small board with only a few spots. Now there are many more spots because players will have three workers per round instead of two (another big change). There is a brand new trade action players can take to upgrade items or get what they need. There will be action spaces that change from round to round like in original Harvest, though these have been completely redone to reflect new mechanics. And of course, you will still be able to take farm and shopping actions just like in the original game, but building is a little different. Buildings have different costs, starting off expensive and getting cheaper over time if no one builds them. The buildings themselves are completely redesigned, though some like the Gazebo make a triumphant return.

Another change that will be pretty apparent to veterans is the player board. Fertilizer and water are now tracked directly on the board don’t worry, fertilizer is still expressed by a poop meeple, this is by far the most common question I’ve gotten about the new version!). Forest will now cover much of your farmland and clearing the land is part of your goals for the game. This will expand your arable land rather thanf having to obtain extensions. Doing so will also put out new buildings to purchase (the flipside of each forest tile is a building). It all works very organically and is more thematic than just adding new slots on your farm.

The Economy

The economy is quite different. Instead of spending crops to purchase things, players will gain money when they harvest ($1 per type of crop harvested, diversity is rewarded!), then use that money to purchase buildings and other items to improve their farm. While money is an extra tracked component from the original, it offers far more freedom for game design and it is a tradeoff I enjoy.

The Crops

The main components of Harvest are the crops themselves. In the original Harvest, you would obtain seeds and then flip them over to the crop side when you planted them. They were a little cumbersome to handle and you could accidentally knock them over pretty easily. We found a solution in polyomino crops, which also adds a great new thinking layer to the game! Polyomino shapes have been very popular in games for the past few years, and this adds a fun spatial management component to your board. The original game focused on space management with crop tokens. Now, you will also have to factor in the shape of the crop as well. It also plays into the balance of the crops, for instance, while Grain is the cheapest crop, it’s also one of the largest. To make good use of large, cheap grain fields which require no fertilizer to plant, you will need to clear large swaths of land and also build fewer buildings. It’s all a balancing act filled with tough decisions!

The Farmers

The last big change is to the player characters. Just like in Harvest, you can play with asymmetrical characters that give strong abilities that will change the way you play the game. The game contains eight all-new abilities. Some will feel familiar to the original game characters. Others will feel wild and fresh. I focused on making these abilities feel powerful and game changing to offer a ton of variety to gameplay. I love that feeling of excitement when you can’t wait to try out a new faction in Terra Mystica or a new character in Marco Polo. There’s always a razor’s edge we walk while trying to balance abilities to feel this way. We spent a lot of time playtesting these characters to ensure fairness, and the option to play without them is always there. New players may want to play without them to facilitate learning other parts of the game first.

Thanks for taking the time to dive into the background of Harvest with me!

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