Everdell Base Game Has One Problem
I love a good game of Everdell, and expansions and subsequent games have fixed the problem I’m about to discuss. The issue for me is that this problem is still prevalent in the base game of Everdell, and until it gets fixed, I always find at least one person at the table is going to have a really bad, and unlucky, experience.
In Everdell, players are getting cards and playing them into their city, using resources to do so, and gaining a variety of benefits. This could be straight resources for future builds, or perhaps a new location for your critters to go to, or an ongoing bonus like a discount when purchasing specific cards. There is also one other bonus available – most (perhaps all?) buildings in Everdell have an associated critter that goes along with them, and should you have the building built in your city, on a subsequent turn you can place out the matching critter for free. This is a really powerful, and almost necessary, ability that allows you to expand your city quickly with great cards at no additional cost. The Farm lets you play out a harvester or gatherer card (husband or wife in the old versions of the game), while the Castle allows you to play the King and the Palace allows you to place the Queen. The King and Queen specifically are very expensive, end game scoring cards – to play these for free could net you quite a few points!
Everdell is about building an engine, so it’s not really the high-cost cards I think about mostly – it is getting those pairings early with the green resource cards, so that when you enter Spring, you can trigger those cards again and have a bevy of resources at your disposal. The issue here is what happens if you never draw cards to get the pairings you need. Listen, Everdell is a big deck, so the chances of getting a good pairing might be pretty low to begin with. But if you are the only person at the table not able to make good card matches early, you likely aren’t going to win. To make things worse, Everdell uses a hard-hand limit of 8, which means if you have eight cards in your hand and you would get to draw a card, you actually do nothing; you’ll have to go to locations on the board to discard cards before drawing back up again. I get the idea here of making this a hand management game, but if you struggle to find a good pairing for your buildings early, and if you can’t cycle through cards quickly because of the hard-hand limit, you might be screwed in the first 30-45 minutes.
The New Leaf expansion fixes this issue by providing each player three wild tokens that allows players to play a character for a specific building in their city as long as the colour of the two cards matches. This has carried over to other games like Everdell Farshore, where character specific matches don’t even exist anymore, and all players get three, golden anchors to use instead. This needs to be a base game inclusion in future printings, or a rules update to just allow people to play this way. I’ve seen it happen too many times; in a four player game, someone is going to really struggle to get some good pairings early, and it will negatively impact their entire experience. And when a game of Everdell could take 2-3 hours to finish, that’s a really crappy feeling for soemone.
Article By Adam
