Everdell

Everdell (2018) is a strategy game where you lead a group of animals seeking to build their home in woodland. You play by placing workers, playing cards and collecting resources. It is a game where every tiny decision has a powerful effect on the success (or otherwise) of the kingdom that you are building.

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You play as the leader of a band of creatures aiming to create the most successful civilisation in the woods of Everdell over one year of forest life. You place your limited number of Worker figures, to gather resources and take actions. These resources enable you to buy Building cards, which in turn allow you to add Creatures cards to your kingdom. As you build your Kingdom deck, you score victory points for each card that you add, but you also unlock extra abilities, which give you more actions and more resources on later turns.

As you play, resources become more limited, space on the board gets taken up and you run out of Worker figures to place. When you get to this point, you have to move on to the next season to release your workers and gain more actions. What's interesting is that players don't move through the four seasons at the same pace. Rush ahead too fast and you might leave a player gaining victory points unopposed at the end, take too long and the game ends before you've completed your plans.

What starts as a resource generation game, quickly becomes a tactical battle set over a thousand small decisions. As you buy and deploy the cards, you begin to build your kingdom adding buildings and creatures, which give you more money and more power. After a while, you begin to feel like the ruler of your own woodland kingdom, where every decision that you make is important.

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Our examiner, Rob Prior, first checked Everdell 22 months ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 14 months ago.