My First Bohnanza
My First Bohnanza Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
The Game Pieces
The Bean Cards
There are ten different types of beans. The number of beans in the game is different for each type. The number there are of each type is printed on the bean cards.
The Beanometer
There are four types of beans that have a beanometer with only one bean dollar at the bottom of the card: 20 Mean Beans, 16 Sour Beans, 12 Broad Beans, and 8 Stink Beans.
There are six types of beans that have a beanometer with two bean dollars at the bottom of the card: 14 Sword Beans, 12 Giant Beans, 10 Dwarf Beans, 9 Magic Beans, 8 Dragon Beans, and 6 Princess Beans.
The beanometer shows how many bean dollars a player can get for harvesting this kind of bean. The numbers tell you how many bean cards of the same type need to be harvested in order to get one or two bean dollars.
Example 1: You cannot harvest one to three Sour Beans. Only if you have four Sour Beans to harvest will you get a bean dollar.
The Bean Dollars
Harvesting your beans will earn you bean dollars, which are shown on the back of the cards. Each card is worth one bean dollar.
The Bean Fields
Each player has his or her own board, which shows his or her bean fields. If you only need two bean fields, you can fold the third one to the back. Each field has enough space for one line of cards, which, if possible, should all be the same type of bean. Each line can be as long as you want.
Getting Ready to Play
You play with the following four bean types: 20 Mean Beans, 16 Sour Beans, 12 Broad Beans and 8 Stink Beans. Put all other cards aside in a pile, with the bean dollar side up. You will need these bean dollar cards later, when you harvest your beans.
Shuffle the cards with the four bean types and deal five cards to each player. The players put these cards in front of themselves, face up, in a row.
The Bohnanza Rule: Players may never change the order of the cards in front of them during the game. Sorting your cards, as you usually do in other card games, is not allowed.
This means that your first card goes all the way to the left of the row, and new cards are always added to the right of the ones you already have.
Put all cards that have not been dealt in the middle of the table as a draw pile, with the bean dollar side up. Finally, give one bean field board to each player, and fold over the third field so that only two are visible.
How to Play
The youngest player begins. On your turn, you take the following three actions in the order listed below:
- Plant bean cards
- Trade bean cards
- Draw bean cards
1. Plant Bean Cards
Your bean field board shows two bean fields. On your turn, you must plant the first card from your row (the one at the very left) in one of your bean fields. This will begin or expand a line of bean cards of one type.
Then, you may plant a second card in one of your fields (again, the one that is now at the very left of your row). You may not plant more than two cards from your row in one turn.
Example 2: Heike first plants the Sour Bean in one of her bean fields, and then the Stink Bean in her other field.
2. Trade Bean Cards
Next, you turn over two cards from the top of the draw pile, put them next to the pile, and begin trading with the other players. The other players may not trade with each other, only with the player whose turn it is.
Trading Rules:
- On your turn, you may offer cards from your row and/or the cards you have turned over from the pile for trade. You may offer or demand several cards in exchange for one card.
- The other players may only offer cards from their own rows for trade. It doesn't matter where in the row the offered cards are, but the order of the other cards may not be changed.
- You may give away cards from your row or cards you turned over as a gift, without demanding cards in return. However, no one is forced to accept such a gift.
Bean cards you receive from a trade are not put into your row, and you may not use them for further trades. You have to immediately plant them in your own bean fields. The same goes for the two cards you turned over from the pile, if you want to keep them or if none of the other players want to take them from you.
You can choose the order in which you plant the cards you receive in trades. Also, you are allowed to harvest beans before planting the next card (see "Harvesting Beans", below).
Example 3: Heike has turned over a Mean Bean and a Sour Bean. She wants to keep the Sour Bean for herself and offers the Mean Bean to the other players. She asks: "Does anyone want the Mean Bean? Ideally, I'd like a Stink Bean in return." When no one makes a counteroffer, she says: "I'm offering the Mean Bean I turned over, plus a Broad Bean from my own row, in exchange for a Stink Bean."
Hayo accepts this second offer, so Heike gives him the Mean Bean from the middle of the table and the Broad Bean from her row, and gets a Stink Bean from Hayo in exchange. Heike plants the Stink Bean she just got and the Sour Bean she turned over in her two bean fields. Hayo also plants the Mean Bean and the Broad Bean he received from the trade in his own fields.
When you don't want to trade any more beans, or if none of the other players makes any more offers, the trading phase of your turn ends.
3. Draw Bean Cards
As the last part of your turn, you must draw three cards from the draw pile, one after the other, and add them to your row—always to the right! Then, the turn to play passes clockwise, to your left-hand neighbor.
Example 4: Heike draws three cards from the draw pile and adds them to the right end of her row.
The "Mixed Patch Rule"
If you have to plant a third type of bean when there are already two other types on your fields, you may put the third type of bean in either one of your fields. This will cover up the beans that were planted in the field before, for the time being. That first type can only be planted again or harvested after the new type has been harvested. This means that there may be several different types of bean in the same field.
Example 5: Uwe has a Stink Bean and two Sour Beans in his fields. He must plant the Mean Bean, which is at the very left of his row, so he decides to plant it in the field with the two Sour Beans.
Harvesting Beans
You always harvest a bean field as soon as it has the necessary number of beans of the same type in an unbroken line, even if it is not your turn! The beanometer on the card shows how many cards you need of that bean type in order to get a bean dollar. Take a card off the dollar pile and put it in front of you, separate from your other cards. The harvested beans are put next to the draw pile with the bean side up, forming a discard pile.
Example 6: Uwe has four Sour Beans in one of his fields, which earn him a bean dollar. He puts the four Sour Bean cards on the discard pile, and takes a bean dollar card off the dollar pile.
Hayo has a Stink Bean, a Mean Bean, and two more Stink Beans in one field, and two Broad Beans in the other. He can harvest the two Stink Beans, which earn him a bean dollar. Hayo puts the two Stink Beans on the discard pile, and takes a bean dollar card off the dollar pile.
Winning the Game
If there are three players, the game ends when the last card from the draw pile is turned over. The player who turned the last card can still finish his or her turn as usual.
With four players, the game ends when the draw pile has been emptied for the second time, and with five players when it's been emptied for the third time. In these cases, when the draw pile runs out, shuffle the discard pile and make a new draw pile.
When the game ends, the bean cards in players' rows and the beans not harvested from their fields are not worth anything. The player with the most bean dollars wins—if several players are tied for the highest number of bean dollars, they are all winners!
Playing With the Other Bean Cards
After several rounds of play, everyone should be familiar with the basic rules, and you are ready to use some new types of beans. You play with the following six bean types: 14 Sword Beans, 12 Giant Beans, 10 Dwarf Beans, 9 Magic Beans, 8 Dragon Beans, and 6 Princess Beans. The other types now serve as bean dollar cards.
The new element is the beanometer with two bean dollars. Players can now choose when they want to harvest a bean type in one of their fields. You can harvest once you have enough beans of the same type for one bean dollar in an uninterrupted line, but you may want to wait and try to plant more of them, until you have enough for two bean dollars in your field.
Example 7: You cannot harvest one or two Magic Beans. Three or four Magic Beans will earn you one bean dollar, but five of them will earn you two bean dollars.
At the end of the game, this means that players who have enough beans for one bean dollar in their field can still harvest those beans. The player takes a card off the dollar pile and adds it to his or her earnings. Once all players who are able to harvest have done so, the player with the most bean dollars wins.
Advanced Rules
The following advanced rules will familiarize children with the whole set of rules for the classic Bohnanza game, one step at a time. You should decide together with the children when to progress from one step to the next, but we suggest you play each step at least three times before explaining the rules to the next one.
Step 1: All Cards Are In Play
In this step, you play the game with all the bean cards. This introduces two rule changes:
First, you now play with three bean fields instead of two. This is necessary because all ten different types of bean are in play. Players should unfold their bean field boards so that all three fields are visible.
Second: so far, all harvested beans were put on the discard pile, while the bean dollars came from a separate dollar pile. Now, a player who harvests beans turns one (or two) of them over to the bean dollar side, and adds them to his or her collected bean dollars. All the remaining bean cards are put on the discard pile.
Example 8: Uwe has four Sour Beans in one of his fields, which earn him one bean dollar. He turns over one of the four cards to show the bean dollar side, and puts it aside. He then puts the other three Sour Beans on the discard pile.
Step 2: A Harvest That Doesn't Earn Bean Dollars
From this step on, the "Mixed Patch Rule" doesn't apply anymore. Instead, you play with Bohnanza's "normal" harvesting rule, meaning there will be harvests that don't earn a player any bean dollars. Under this rule, a player may be forced to harvest a row of beans to plant another (fourth) type. If there are not enough beans in the row to earn any bean dollars, all of those beans are simply discarded.
Example 9: Hayo has two Magic Beans, two Dragon Beans, and three Sour Beans in his three bean fields. He has to plant the Giant Bean at the far left end of his row in a field. As all three of his fields are occupied with other types, he must first harvest one of them. None of the fields has enough beans to earn him a bean dollar, so he decides to harvest the Sour Beans. He takes all three Sour Beans and puts them on the discard pile, then plants the Giant Bean in the field that is now empty.
Step 3: Buying the Third Bean Field
From this step on, players can decide if they want to play with two or three bean fields. All players start the game with two fields, with the third one folded over. During the game, players can buy their third field for three bean dollars. A player who wants to do so takes three of his or her collected bean dollars and puts them on the discard pile with the bean side up. Players can do this at any point during the game. To show that the player now owns three fields, he or she folds open the bean field board so that all three fields are visible.
Step 4: Taking the Cards In Hand
In this step, players hold their cards in their hand rather than putting them down in front of themselves in a row. But, even in hand, players may not change the order of their cards.
For dealing out and drawing new cards, this means that a new card is always put behind the last card drawn. When the active player has to plant a card from his or her hand, this must always be the first card—in other words, the one at the front, which is completely visible.
Young children often have difficulties holding a large number of cards in hand at the same time. In this case, you can skip Step 4 and go straight to Step 5. If you do, however, we suggest that you start playing the "full-scale" Bohnanza with revealed hands as well. If and when the children are ready, you can still move to playing with cards in hand at a later point.
Step 5: The "Protection Rule"
As the final step, you should introduce the "protection rule" for single bean cards in a bean field. This means that a bean field with only one card on it may only be harvested if the player in question has one or no cards in all of his or her fields.
Example 10: Heike may not harvest the field with the single Sword Bean on her board. Uwe, however, may harvest any of his three single bean types.
Summary
With this last step, the children have gradually been introduced to all the rules of classic Bohnanza. It may well be that they now want to play with the "real" Bohnanza cards as well. You can swap bean types from this edition with types from the Bohnanza base game, but if you do, you should swap types of the same frequency for each other. For example, you could swap the Princess Beans for the Garden Beans, the Stink Beans for the Red Beans, the Dwarf Beans for the Black-eyed Beans, etc.
It should be up to the children how many bean types they want to swap. The beans from the normal game don't change the rules any further, but the more complex beanometers will be more challenging for the children, who now need to consider much more carefully when and with whom to trade their beans.
The Pedagogic Concept Behind "My First Bohnanza"
Playing is Learning
The following elaboration is not intended to help you understand or play the game My First Bohnanza. Rather, it is meant to explain the pedagogic concept behind it. The approach used here is unique, and so far has not been used for any other games. So what's so special?
The point was not to develop a learning game, but to use a game to make children learn something while having fun. Well-established games known to be a lot of fun (such as Bohnanza) are particularly suited to this approach.
People play games because they learn a lot while they do so. However, this kind of learning is largely not a conscious process, but primarily an intuitive, unnoticed one. Usually, the "educational targets" cannot be exactly defined, and the players themselves often don't notice them as such. The game is just fun.
If it is, they will play it time and again, gaining experience and automatically getting better at it. During the first few rounds, they learn how they can do better next time. After a while, they know how to transfer the experience from this game to other, similar ones. It becomes easier to learn new games, and people tend to get better faster.
Learning With My First Bohnanza
Basically, My First Bohnanza is a "building block kit". The different rules are the individual blocks. Once you have "built in" all of the blocks, you know the rules of Bohnanza. The shape of the object you are building (the game) constantly changes: from a very simple, basic version, through small changes and adjustments, you keep creating a new game, until you reach the "normal" Bohnanza.
The most important aspect of this pedagogic concept is that the individual changes are as small as possible. Very few new things need to be learned at the same time, so the child is not overtaxed (and adults, also, can focus on the most relevant things at first).
Learning fundamentally new things requires new structures (connections) to be created within the brain, which takes some time (one night at least, but often several days). If too many new things are conveyed at the same time, these connections can't stabilize, causing "learning gaps" which generally lead to—often unexpected and seemingly unexplainable—problems or errors later.
To avoid this, one should only introduce the next step once the previous one has been mastered. This is even more important for the first steps than for the later ones. Every insecurity will resurface time and again later, as the mind is focused on the next, new step while the previous one has not been mentally "digested" yet. If something doesn't work the first time around, it isn't necessarily a problem. If something is very new to a child, the attention span can be quite brief the first time. But the child will return again and again, able to do a little bit better every time. The (apparent) slowness of learning requires patience more than anything else.
In principle, this approach is independent of age. While older children and adults may be faster at learning, because they already have accumulated experience which lends itself to it (the chance of similarities to relate to is higher), but this learning process is less systematic. It is not always certain that the prior experience will "carry", or how far—meaning if it is really relatable and error-free. In this respect, My First Bohnanza is suitable for people of any age who want to master Bohnanza particularly well in the end. Many are amazed that a complex set of rules such as that of Bohnanza can be so smoothly adapted so that 3- or 4-year-olds can play it.
What Does This Mean For Learning My First Bohnanza?
Irrespective of age, you should follow the rules and "play it safe" as much as possible, but you can make the amount of repetition of the individual steps dependent on the children's experience. If they are already familiar with similar rules from other games, it is possible to introduce several small adjustments at once.
However, there are rules that are not intuitive, and have probably been learnt differently in other games. For example, cards in Bohnanza are turned over to also serve as bean dollars. Even many adults playing Bohnanza get this wrong at first.
This is why, with My First Bohnanza, there is a separate card pile for the bean dollars in the first few steps. Once players have gotten used to the idea, it is no problem later to just turn over the card. Learning the game element "Use the back of the card as currency" is split up into two smaller steps, which are more easily internalized individually than they would otherwise be.
Educational Elements of Bohnanza
1. Numbers
Especially for young children, My First Bohnanza is an easy way to learn and practice their numbers (numerals). The bigger numbers—the total number of a given card type in the game—should be left out at first, until the children ask about them of their own accord. Once they do, you can have them sort the cards by bean type so that the children "see" the different heights of the piles. The number then is simply an abbreviation for this experience (of quantity).
2. Numbers and Quantities
In Bohnanza, the numeral (beanometer) is always connected to the quantity of bean dollars. Here, you can start by pointing out the differences and commonalities, advantages and disadvantages of both kinds of depiction (number and quantity). "Which quantities can you recognize without counting?"; "How quickly do you recognize this number?"; "Can you quickly guess how large this quantity is?" This is a great basis from which to teach the child the concept of quantity. The game has created a simple and highly intuitive basic model from which to build an understanding of the term.
3. Negotiation
Negotiation is a very interesting element of Bohnanza, although at first it may seem tough. The easiest way of teaching it to younger children is to explain that it's like trading sweets: "I will give you my lollipop if you give me one or two of your gum drops." Most children will have experienced this situation by the age of 3 or 4, and can now transfer this experience to the trading of needed bean cards for useless ones—at least useless to them. Of course, this will only work if the other player has a use for the bean that is offered for trade.
Once this basic principle is understood, more complex trades can be introduced, such as: "If you give me the Princess Bean now, I will give you the next bean you need as soon as I have it."
Bohnanza lends itself very well to this kind of cooperative play, but it can also be played competitively. Children don't always have well-meaning fellow players, and need to learn how to handle this fact. Moreover, games are a great way to explore potentially negative emotions without causing any actual harm to others. With Bohnanza, you can introduce this element to younger players by asking at the start of the game (ideally in a playfully overacting, tongue-in-cheek way): "Today I'm really 'mad'! I want to play totally 'mean' now, and really 'rip you off' when we play Bohnanza. You all OK with that?" This will make it clear to the children that you are playing a role, and that the game can be played this way or the other way (although the game mechanisms of Bohnanza lend themselves better to cooperation than confrontation). Afterwards, it may be important to compliment the children on getting into—and back out of—the role, to emphasize that the fun of playing such a role and of the game itself is the focus, rather than winning.
4. The Beanometer and its Options
"Why do you collect the beans for a longer time even though you could already harvest them?" That is an interesting question, which can lead to an understanding of the exponential nature of the beanometer. Here, too, the question "Have you seen this kind of thing elsewhere?" can help the child (analogically) transfer the experience to other areas. The concrete experience of the game is "abstracted", meaning that the child sees the general aspects of the experience. If the children cannot think of anything by themselves, you can give them initial examples until they go on from those independently. It is important with comparisons like this, however, to ask children what is similar as well as what is different, to avoid unnoticed errors in the transfer of what they have just learned.