Everdell is a worker placement and tableau building game that shares some vibes with Catan, Wingspan, Wyrmspan and Flamecraft. You’ll send workers out to forage for resources and use those resources to build your own, personal village. But the Everdell difference starts with the board: it’s not just the typical cardboard rectangle.
Everdell has an undulating board with a central “meadow” for shared cards and resources—twigs, stones, resin & pebbles—placed along the river. The vertical Evertree holds your little wooden animal workers, which you’ll receive along the course of play, plus some bonus cards and the draw deck.
Each player chooses a set of meeples: mouse, turtle, hedgehog or rabbit. The game is played over 4 seasons, beginning with Winter, so each player gets the appropriately sparse number of workers: two. The rest are placed in the Evertree.
Forest cards are placed in the forest clearings; event cards are placed in their designated spots; eight random game cards are dealt face up into the Meadow. Then each player gets a hand of game cards: 5 cards for the first player with one more card for each consecutive player, up to 8 cards if you’re playing with 4 people.
The rule is: the most humble player goes first. We arbitrarily chose Chris because none of us are really that humble and we sure as heck knew it wasn’t going to be Mandi! The objective is to build a City of up to 15 cards with the highest points for buildings and their critter occupants.
Each turn allows one action: place a worker, play a card or prepare for the next season. At the start of the game, in Winter, all you have is two workers so the trick is to look at the cards in your hand, see what resources it will take to play those cards, and try to place your worker in a location that allows you to earn the necessary resources. If the location has an open paw print, you can place your worker there and collect the prize.
If you have the required twigs, pebbles, berries and resin, you can play a card into your City from your hand or from the shared cards in the Meadow. Once you have placed all your workers and play all your cards, you have to move on to the next Season. The Prepare for Season action means you get to bring all your workers back, pluck new workers from the Evertree, and get new Season bonuses.
A warning: The first time we played Everdell we thought we must be missing something. The Winter season seemed pointless because we all had resources that wouldn’t let us play any cards. We said, “Huh. Is this it? Seems kinda stupid that you can’t do anything except move on to the next Season and try again.”
A couple of YouTube videos and a second play through later, we realized, “No! That’s the point!” Everdell starts slow and builds up to a cascade of actions. Everybody is working on their own Cities. You don’t even have traditional turns because each player moves to a new Season at their own pace. There are cards that give you resources; cards that give you more cards or the opportunity to discard lower points for better ones. There are actions that let you play free Critters into your City. It’s just an endless variety of stuff that depends on the cards you get and how you play them.
A couple of tips, though. First: pebbles are hard to get so grab them when you can.
Second: try to play the cards with the leafy green symbol when you can because they activate three times over the course of the game.The green cards, and their bonus effects, trigger when you play them then again in Spring and Autumn.
Everdell has a LOT of cards–128 game cards–so it will probably take everyone a few play-throughs to figure out a winning strategy. Mandi got the hang of it immediately, of course. The store was pretty busy both times we played Everdell so we never got a chance to play all the way through to the final point count but we figure Mandi won because that seems to be the house rule. Alas.
In a regular game, Everdell will take you about an hour. There’s a solo version or you can play with 2, 3 or 4 and there’s a ton of variability so this is a game you can play over and over again. The artwork is beautiful, the components are high quality and fun to handle and the game is very well balanced so nobody can really run away with it–no, not even Mandi! There’s not too much luck of the draw and the shared Meadow resources give everybody a chance at building the best City.
40-80 minutes playtime * 1-4 players * Ages 10+