I’ve just played Everdell. It’s a pretty breezy worker placement game with a very cute forest animal theme.
You are tasked with building a city of cards in your tableau over the course of a year. You’ll be placing workers to gather resources and play cards from you hand as well as from a communal pool (called The Meadow). What’s different is that playing cards (which you do by spending resources) does not consume resources. So as long as your engine can create resources your season doesn’t end.
There’s a surprising amount of player interaction with your cards (representing building and creatures) reacting based on what your opponents have played or flat out messing with their plans. The slots to place workers are also very constrained so you’ll often be cursing your opponents.
The art is wonderful, presumably paid for by a successful Kickstarter a la Brass: Birmingham. Critters are rendered in detail but with buckets of characters. The Husband mouse is an absolute wife guy.
From the first image you might notice a large cardboard tree. It holds your spare workers and some achievements. I think this is overkill. It makes the board only visible from one direction and retrieving stuff from it quite fiddly. Some of the semiotics on the board are a unclear too. Everdell could learn a lot from Viticulture on both these fronts.
It took about 3 hours for the teach, play, and eating of Easter treats. I really enjoyed it and would play it again straight away. If we’d started playing in the morning I’d have asked for another game of it.
Check this game out if you like Eurogames.