Harvest review

Harvest has a lot of things going for it. The anthropomorphic animals, while a bit overdone at this point, are still super cute, and the general vibe of the art style is very charming and inviting. The vibrant colors, chunky pieces, and peaceful landscape provide a welcoming setting to play around in. Unfortunately, the gameplay just doesn’t deliver. 

Harvest is a worker placement game with very limited actions and mechanisms so closely tied together that any deviation from the mandatory order of operations is punishing. With only 12 turns, the game practically plays itself. You have to get seeds. You have to plant those seeds. You have to water the seeds. You have to harvest. You could possibly ignore that cycle and go for buildings as an alternate strategy, but that is about it. Because it’s a worker placement game, one person is likely getting shut out of farming due to the limited worker spaces, and therefore goes for buildings. The formula doesn’t allow the player to really make any decisions that feel impactful, so the game quickly disappears into the flowchart of farming actions. 

To make limited actions work, you have to let players build an engine that turns single turns into something more if they planned correctly. Games that do this well make players feel powerful and clever when their late-game turns chain multiple actions together. Harvest doesn’t allow that. Instead, the first player to go into each action zone gets to do more iterations of the chosen action than the players who go to the next available spaces. Rather than building an engine, playing for turn order is really all that matters. To make things worse, each character has a special ability, and one of them is just to get an extra action each round. That is absolute insanity in a game with 12 actions. One player just gets 25% more turns?

Taken as a whole, Harvest just doesn’t make sense. The theme and artwork seem designed to appeal to casual gamers or even people entirely new to the hobby, but contrast that with the extremely strict 12-turn worker placement gameplay, and those players bounce right off. That amount of turns is not enough time to feel like you really did anything. I grew a few plants because I had to, and then the game ended. At the same time, there is no crunch to appeal to more hardcore Euro gamers who may like the efficiency puzzle of limited action games. The optimal strategy is very straightforward and uninteresting. It feels like a lot of decisions were made to make Harvest as accessible and widely appealing as possible, but what we are left with is a game that doesn’t know what it wants to be.