Midwife and Growth Queue Dynamics
First, let's start with the card in question: Midwife (D160):
Each time another player uses the first person they place in a round to take a “Family Growth” action, you get 1 grain from the general supply.
Lumin's Agricola Statistics report gives this card a power of 4.3 which ranks 209 out of 503 cards. In theory, this may get 3 grain in the mid-game (as players take their first growth) and 2-3 grain in the late game (once Wish for Children is available). In practice, certain circumstances can make it much worse than that.
From Game 414588913 Move 123, take a look at
the board when Midwife is played:
In this situation, Green (Jshavey) has built the only room and Teal (Direful) is starting, but does not have enough resources to build. Gray (me, wooddistributor) is low on resources and won't be able to build for a while. And finally, our Midwife player, Red (hentheben), is ready to build.
There are three possible outcomes depending on when Wish for Children is revealed in stage 2:
- Revealed in Round 5
- If Wish for Children flips in round 5, Green will not be forced to take Wish for Children first action, since Teal does not have enough resources to build a room. Red will likely want to grow in round 6 and would build this round. Thus, Midwife fails to activate in at least the first two opportunities.
- Revealed in Round 6
- Green is not required to take Meeting Place, but either way, Red will likely build this round. This would pressure someone to take Wish for Children with their first action in round 6, and Midwife would start activating as the growth queue resolves (except of course when Red grows).
- Revealed in Round 7
- This would be likely best case scenerio, as most players would have rooms built by now and the standard growth queue would occur where the starting player takes Wish for Children (activating Midwife) and the second player takes Meeting Place to grow first action next round.
As it happens, Wish for Children does reveal in round 5, and Green waits until their second action to grow. The unfortunate timing of this game leads to the following grows:
| Round Number | Wish for Children | Urgent Wish without Room | Midwife activations (Total) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 (Wish revealed) | 2nd action (Green) | ||
| 6 | 1st action (Red) | ||
| 7 | 2nd action (Teal) | ||
| 8 | 3rd action (Red) | ||
| 9 | 2nd action (Gray) | ||
| 10 | 3rd action (Gray) | ||
| 11 | 4th action (Gray) | ||
| 12 (Urgent Wish revealed) | 1st action (Red) | ||
| 13 | 1st action (Teal) | 🎉 1 🎉 | |
| 14 | 1st action (Green) | 2 |
Wish for Children revealing early, combined with the player growing second having played Midwife (so no activation), and me not building until I can double-build all contribute to the most unlucky Midwife I've seen (and it still produced as much grain as Pub Owner normally does!).
The takeaway for this specific situation is that there is a 1/3 chance that Wish for Children reveals in round 5 and Midwife likely gets very little value. The action to play Midwife at the end of round 4 could have been delayed to round 5 (and only played if Wish for Children is not revealed) without any downside. The greater takeaway is if you are going to play Midwife, try to play out the growth queue in your head and if it actually will play out where players are forced to grow first action
If you have any feedback, please reach out to me via email! I can append any comments you email me to the bottom of this post. If anyone has a good example of a game where Midwife activates a ton, send me a link and I can add it as an addition section here.
Thanks for reading!