Everdell is a turn-based worker-placement economic/farming/building game, similar to Viticulture (if you like one, you'll like the other). In a nutshell, you place your workers on the board to get resources of different types (wood, resin, pebbles, berries, cards, coins), and when you have enough resources to pay for a card, you lay it in your "city" in front of you, reaping the reward of that card. This progresses until you have no more workers, can purchase nothing else with your resources in hand, or opt to pass. At this point you retrieve all your workers, get some additional, and enjoy the benefits of the next phase (which is often the re-activating of some of your cards that make even more additional resources for the coming round). At the end of three rounds, players score to see who had the highest number of points/coins. Everdell has a few interesting mechanics that make it different from other worker-placement games. First, you are limited to the number of cards you may play ("in your city"), which means you might build the perfect engine and discover while you can afford expensive items you have no where to put them! So, it requires long term planning, strategy, and thinking about your options. Second, certain cards allow you to obtain other cards for free, so if you get the dependency chains just right, you can save your resources (but your city fills quicker). Third, the game doesn't hit a stall state where one player has done everything they can and must wait while others catch up before going to the next phase ("season"), rather you retrieve your workers and keep going. Although, at the end of the game, you might have to wait for players, but things move quickly and you can total your points at that time. This last item is where the game really shines -- because you're effectively making a choice: More Workers or Linger for more scraps (because you don't have enough workers to get all the resources you need). In the latter case, you get more millage from your turn, but the other player is going to be able to grab the stuff you want. However, there's a balance, in that your workers remain parked in places they'd like to be visiting (so you can block them). The game design in beautiful, it's colorful, it's got cute characters, and yes, there's a huge 3D cardboard tree as well. It's got nice little resource objects to fidget with while you're contemplating your turn. There's a huge deck of options, all kinds of variation cards so each game is unique and has its own bonuses, and there's even a mode where it can play single player. It's easy to explain and jump into. It is a good game for players that like a broad to overwhelming array of options that merely grows even larger with play. But, if you plan too far ahead, someone else can easily swoop in, take the card you had pinned everything on, and cause you to go back to the drawing board ...but because there are so many other options, the setback isn't that bad, often requiring a slight pivot of strategy, and so the game doesn't get frustrating when things don't work out as hoped. The cons. Turns out the 3D tree is highly superficial (and it has to be disassembled for storage). It's only function is to hold extra workers and four tiny cards, as well as some reminder text. The tree itself also holds the draw deck, which can make it difficult to get to. Print isn't in the best contrast or color selection, some text appears to be in a thin flourished font, and it's all a little too small for older eyes or bad lighting. The board itself is extremely busy, and the relative sizes of "one worker" / "two workers" / "many workers" is subtle. (Eventually you learn lower areas of the board are for multi-workers, cards have two spots printed on them, and pretty much everything else is one worker. Additionally, the iconography is pretty good, so the only thing to really worry about are the cards, which suffer less from the above issues.) The cards try to jam a lot of information onto them, and this can make reading them difficult due to the small sizes. For instance, want to know how many cards there are of that type? You have to look closely at the art work to find a very tiny number etched in a rock. Want to see what character a card can bring in? There's tiny print and even a tinier picture at the bottom right. We literally keep a magnifying glass at the table. Bonus cards better on readability, but they tend to use a comma where they mean an ampersand. But, again, none of this really detracts from game play, as once you get it, you won't need to do a lot of reading. The instruction manual is beautiful to look at and contains a lot of flavor content, and I give them props for keep it all to the side rather than interlacing it with the instructions themselves. The only serious complaint would be that the main instructions didn't go far enough in the text department. For instance, it'll show you a card and there'll be a tiny flyout reading "free character" and that's it. ...does that mean this card it's printed on is free? ...do all cards have this? ...are the cards that have this special? ...how do you use this, do you use this, when would you use this? Turns out, if you play the game the first time and discover that you've got a bunch of tiny chits you didn't use and a number of cards they fit on and you see other similar cards with those names, it'll click what they're for. And, it wouldn't have taken much to explain "If you card shows this, and the thing it names is available, cover it with one of those, and take the card without paying the cost." On the whole, Everdell is a very enjoyable and satisfying thematic game that offers strategy, construction, and engine building (over three phases) in such a way that there are extra considerations that make game play more fun. Would highly recommend this for game nights and gifting.Weiterlesen
