Everdell by Starling Games
- 1-4 Players
- 20mins/player
- Age: 14+
Gameplay Overview
Everdell follows animals in the forest preparing for the next winter. You control your species and set them on various tasks each month. At it’s heart it is a worker placement game. There is also hand management and card management becomes increasingly important as your city grows.
Each season a player takes one action and then the next player takes an action until no one can take any further actions. In the first season you only have two workers but this increases as the seasons progress. You will often have many more actions depending on the order that you do things.
You gather resources and build buildings and recruit creatures for your city. All of the buildings and creatures will either have automatic effects; effects as the seasons progress; or will score points at the end of the game.
The decisions that you make will change the sort of city you develop and the creatures you recruit. There are also random bonus quests that require a combination of buildings and creatures to get extra victory points.
Once you reach winter you tally up the points that your city is worth as well as the bonus objectives you have achieved.
Is the Game any Good?
It feels that you have very limited number of actions, especially in the first season as you only have two workers. With only four rounds I felt this game would be over quicker than it took us to pop all the pieces out and put the giant tree together.
But, that was not the case. There are things will lead you to been able to take many more actions than the two or three workers you have to place. First, you can play cards from your hand or from the meadow (line up) for your action. Second, some cards will trigger as soon as you play them given you the ability to play other cards or get resources to play other cards.
By ordering your actions you can chain things together to play many actions. In my last game one of my friends had finished building their city in the second season. It then just came down to whether I could get higher scoring buildings, creatures and objectives than them. It was tight.
Awesome pieces but some design issues
The pieces in this game are fantastic. The berries are slightly squishy, the rocks are smooth, the amber is jagged, and the workers are awesome. The stand out piece of this game is the giant tree that plays as the centre piece of this game. It hold the deck at its base and the objectives in its boughs. It looks great, but is a bit of a gimmick
A big issue with this game is the size of the text on the cards. While there isn’t much on any but the most complicated cards the text is still tiny. One could even say it is microscopic on the half sized objective cards. These cards are placed in the bough of the tree, making them the cards that are the furthest away. Also, while round logs are great for representing wood. They are not the best in practice as they kept rolling onto the floor.
I thoroughly enjoy this game but it is better with more people. I think it is pretty well balanced as everyone is able to pursue their own objective without been super cut off the cards or resources they are after. This can be a real problem in worker placement games so it is nice to see that Everdell has avoided that pitfall.
