Everdell Review – A Beautiful Game at a Hefty Price

At the time of writing, the Kickstarter for Everdell complete edition has 56 hours left. The all-in pledge of 200 USD includes the base game and five expansions. That’s a lot of content, but also a lot of dollars.

So before you commit, let’s talk about Everdell.

This tableau-building worker placement board game’s theme is straight out of Wind in the Willows or Redwall. In it, you need to prepare for the upcoming winter by building the best city you can over four rounds.

To build this city you’ll send workers onto the board to gather resources to play cards from your hand (or from the marketplace) to your city. These cards will either be buildings or creatures, but will always provide you with a benefit or victory points.

The key difference between the two types of cards is that buildings additionally give you the benefit of allowing you to play a creature card on it for free. If you build a birdhouse, for example, you can then play a bird card without spending any resources.

After each round or season, you unlock more workers to send out into the woods. This in turn gets you more resources to play more cards. These workers can also be used to complete goal cards around the Ever Tree netting you victory points.

Once winter rolls around, the player with the most victory points wins the game.

Everdell is a toddler’s puzzle

It feels great when you get the right building and can play a creature for free in Everdell. So much so, that you’ll laugh in the face of all the unspent resources.

However, the thing about Everdell is you’re never guaranteed these combinations will appear. Often you’re left with a hand of cards that works only in your imagination, as when it plays out, you’re left waiting for the second card of the combination to appear.

This results in a lot of tension between deciding whether you should play a creature for its benefit now, or wait till the right building appears and play it for free.

In this way, it’s like a toddler’s puzzle, where it should be simple enough to put together these combinations, and therefore strategies. But instead, half of the pieces of the puzzle are missing, and those that are left are bent out of shape. So even though you know what a good strategy looks like, you’re going to struggle to make it a reality.

This makes Everdell such a fascinating board game to play. Because upon starting you haven’t the faintest clue about what your city will look like at the end.

As you pick up cards, you must improvise, and take chances. Sometimes you’ll get lucky, other times not so much. But that never means you’re out of the game, it only means you have a harder path to walk.

Since there are so many ways to score victory points in Everdell, it’s unlikely for players to complete every objective, or capture every point. Therefore, there are always opportunities for you to score points, no matter how dire the circumstances may be.

The emperor’s new board game

Everdell has a wealth of replayability through its random locations, and bonus objectives. Where each new card, doesn’t change the game drastically but enough to allow for different strategies.

However, there are some oddities and clunkiness within Everdell as well. For example, the hard card limit for your city. So towards the end of the game, you can fill your city full of cards, and then just sit on your hands… I guess?

There doesn’t seem like a good reason to enforce this limitation. Instead, it seems to unnecessarily ruin strategies. Like if you wanted to swarm your board with cheap cards for example.

However, the worst offence of Everdell isn’t found in its gameplay, but in its price. It’s one of the more expensive board games I’ve bought, and when I first opened the box my immediate thought was – is that it?

The price-to-piece ratio isn’t something I particularly care about, but it was so egregious in Everdell I had to do some research.

The cost of Everdell

Both Spirit Island and Underwater Cities have 23% and 79% more components in their games despite costing the same amount. These games are also more complex. So it’s reasonable to believe that more time and effort were put into their development.

Now I’m left wondering. Where the heck is all our money going? At what point do you think that they’re no longer adding cool things because they believe it’s best for the players, and instead are trying to take as much advantage of us as possible?

When it comes to Starling Games and Everdell, I believe they crossed that point a long ago. This is why, despite enjoying the game and loving Andrew Bosley’s artwork, I can’t convince myself to buy any more Everdell.

Going backwards to go forwards

Despite how expensive Everdell is I’m sure the price will quickly become forgotten. Replaced with fond memories of building out wild cities and completing objectives even when all hope was lost.

If there’s one thing Everdell is fantastic at, it’s providing weird and wonderful paths to victory. Unlike other engine builders like Jump Drive, the cards in Everdell aren’t always straightforward. Often cards let you destroy other cards in your city for different effects, and while this helps you fit within the fifteen-card limit. It’s also a left turn from how these engine builders usually play.

When usually, you just grow and grow and grow in engine builders Everdell offers you growth at a price, and usually, it’s hard to know if that price is worth it. This cut-off-your-nose-to-save-your-face gameplay doesn’t always work for me, but it’s unique to the genre, and that I love.

Overall, Everdell is one of the better board games released in recent years. It sits alongside Wingspan in both depth and simplicity of rules, which is fantastic company to be in. The tableau building is well done, and combining buildings and creatures is really enjoyable. If you can get over the price, then this board game is worth your attention.