Tonight I got to play Everdell, a worker placement board game with woodland creatures that debuted in 2018.
Between Everdell and Root, 2018 was a big year for woodland creatures in popular tabletop games. I have played Root a few times before, but this was my first time playing Everdell.
I played it with two friends from work after hours. We have a tabletop club and this was the first ever "Looking for Game" post that turned into playing something. The game went from about 5:30pm (setup, learning the rules) to 5:45 (start) to 7:00 (game over) to 7:15pm (clean up finished). Overall, at 90mins of playtime with only one person who had ever played before, I was surprised at how straightforward to learn and play this game was.
The game itself is about building up a productive and prosperous city in the woods under the shade of the titular "Everdell Tree". Each player has their own city that largely stays independent of the others, save for a few written exceptions. Each turn, players take one action: either build up their city by constricting buildings or enticing villagers to come live there, or players take one of their extremely limited worker tokens and places it on one of many open spots to do things like gathering resources, drawing cards, etc. Over time, as you run out of workers to place or actions to take, players can "advance seasons" for themselves from spring to summer to autumn as a way to get their workers back. The game ends at the end of autumn when all players have run out of actions to perform, and the player with the most victory points wins.
Since the options for buildings and villagers are partly shared by a common area in the middle, and since the open spots for worker placement are shared among the players, there's a complex strategy of trying to maximize your own city's ability to produce what you need to eventually start gaining victory points versus trying to prevent other players from becoming too efficient with their own cities and leaving yours in the dust. Because the advancement of players through seasons can be staggered based on actions taken per season, there can be lots of times where it's helpful for you to advance or avoid advancing so that you can make the best use of workers on spaces or having access to the best buildings or villages in a given turn.
The look of the game appeals to me. I love woodland creatures and the artwork is great. The wooden worker pieces are adorable. I used the wooden hedgehog/porcupine-shaped ones. The cards that are used for buildings and villagers have distinct and cohesive art direction, and the effects of them generally tie into what the cards do. For example, a farm card produces food when it's added to your city, and the husband and wife pair of mice, which you can play at a discount if you have the farm, help you gain even more food or victory points from owning a farm if you have one.
I think the mechanics of the game work well and manage to be simple yet varied. You only have one of two actions that you can do each turn, which is quite limiting. Yet, there are lots of options for each of those actions, and they even vary slightly across games due to how the cards are shuffled and dealt, how the turns are ordered, and how the non-basic worker placement spots are added during setup. Altogether, it seems like the game will be significantly different with 3 versus 4 and it will also be different across sessions - something I always enjoy.
I find the design of the game mostly straightforward, with a few caveats. Generally, it's easy to remember which resources are used for living beings like villagers (it's usually berries) and which ones are used for buildings (it's usually a combo of stone, wood, and resin), and it's also very clear what you're going to get when you do a given worker placement or play a card. There are a few rules like max hand size (8) and max city size (15 cards) that could be clearer, rather than just a rule that needs to be constantly watched for. I really like how other games like Puerto Rico solved the city-building problem by having a fixed grid that buildings are added to over the game until nothing else fits. In Everdell, I forgot for the first hour that 15 was the max city size, and I luckily was reminded before it caused problems, but ideally the design would make that clear for me. There's also some design choices around what counts as a space that workers can be placed that I believe could have been clearer. Beyond these, the design of the board and the tall cardboard Everdell tree that literally sits over the game area and holds cards and pieces, it all works well to inform the mechanics.
The theme of woodland creatures helps tell a story of cute abstractions that hide some deeper negative effects of capitalism (the worker placement and city-building) on the rest of the natural setting (woodland creatures in the forest for about a year). There are buildings ranging from dungeons, where villagers are sacrificed for resources, to universities, where buildings are stripped for parts to make space for new and more efficient buildings or villagers. The game shows industrialization over the course of its play, but it doesn't seem to grapple with those consequences. The winner is the person whose city is best at making victory points - usually by efficiency, so anything not in service to those dividends can and should be literally discarded to the discard pile for the best strategies.
It's hard not to contrast this with Root, since they both came out in 2018, since I've played both, and since both are woodland themed. In Root, the design of the theme and mechanics is deliberate in making the actions each player can play asymmetrical. One player may control many pieces vying for territorial control on the board (representing colonization) while another player gets victory points just by disrupting that first player (representing organized rebellion). A third player may only control a single piece and win by making money while allying with the other factions (representing arms dealing). In that game, the mechanics do a much better job of both representing the themes and helping players interact with those themes in a tangible way. When the person playing as a colonizer wins, the takeaway from the rest of the players is something about how oppressive the colonization felt on the board, or how brutal the interactions of that faction were with the others. In Everdell, the takeaway for the losing players seems to be "I should have been better at capitalism than the person who won".
Everdell is fun, it's well designed, it's cute, and I'll happily play it again. I just wish a game that substituted animals for people was willing to introspect into the story of its gameplay and use that setting to make broader observations about the very real and human problems of industrialization and resource-scarcity that are depicted through its gameplay.