Everdell is also one of the games I backed on Kickstarter. The campaign was running in January 2018. and collected almost half a million dollars. It promised a great looking game that is easy to learn and fun to play. The promise is fulfilled! Several expansions for Everdell were also kickstarted in the meantime, but this review is for the base game only, and the solo variant of it.

About the game

In Everdell, you are competing with other players to build your own critters city which is more valuable than cities of other players. You do that by sending your workers around the country to collect resources, achieve events, or embark on a journey. The resources are then used to add constructions to your city or to populate the city with various critters. Both the constructions and the critters usually bring some end game points and additional benefits.

The game plays in four seasons. You are starting at the end of winter and progressing through spring, summer, and autumn. Each season triggers a specific event and increases the number of workers. The game ends after the autumn season when all players sum and compare their total points. The player with the most points is the winner.

In essence, Everdell is a worker-placement, tableau-building, card game. You need to build the most profitable city with up to 15 cards.

The rules for the solo play are similar to a two-player game, from the player’s perspective. The opponent the player face is Rugwort, an old rodent who is sending an army of his rats to conquer Everdell. Rugwort doesn’t build the city as a regular player, but instead locks the access to some resources and matches player’s city-building actions. There are three levels of difficulty for solo play, which differ mostly by the final scoring.

Components

The first thing anyone will notice about Everdell is components. They really do pop from the table. The art is simply gorgeous with beautiful colors that paint the world inhabited by critters. We have a big, oval board with resources, event locations, and the meadow with critter and construction cards. On top of it lies the Ever Tree, a 3D cardboard tree, where you put a deck of cards, special events, and season workers. Some people argue that Ever Tree is overproduction and that it doesn’t bring anything functional to the game, as you could just put those elements aside the main board, but it certainly increases the coolness factor of the game.

The resources in the game are represented with nice-looking, plastic, colorful shapes, matching the resource type. My favorites are resin resources, which are orange and translucent, and berries, which are squishy! Workers are represented with wooden meeples, shaped like a certain critter (hedgehogs, rabbits, ferrets, turtles…). The basic event tiles match the main board design and special events and forest resources are done as small cards.

Finally, there is a huge number of critter and construction cards (about 150 in my box) with outstanding artwork! The detail on each card is simply great and they are beautiful. The quality is also very good as they have a linen finish. It’s important, as then need to be shuffled before each game.

I am a proud owner of the Collectors Edition of Everdell. It upgrades the base retail version with metal coins, rat workers, wooden occupy tokens, and a deluxe 8-sided die for the solo game.

My thoughts

The rules are simple to grasp and nicely explained in a rulebook. The rulebook for the second printing of a game is even better as it clarifies few things and fixes errors from the first version. I got the second edition rulebook through the Pearlbrook expansion campaign.

While the rules are easy to learn from the rulebook, it’s not all that Everdell has to offer. Each critter and construction card has an additional benefit with the text written on the card itself. The rulebook is also explaining each card in detail. It takes some time to figure out what each card has to offer.

Even if the game looks like it’s created for children and it has relatively simple rules, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy to master. It starts slow, when you only have two workers at disposal, and might seem extremely limited. But after a few rounds and once you get into the final two seasons, it gets very thinky. The season change is a great factor of game experience, as you need to plan your resource usage toward it and try to have some green production cards in your city that will be triggered - for instance, a combination of Farm, Wife, and Husband is very good.

Besides production cards, I am also a big fan of blue governance cards, as they grant you ongoing bonuses each time you play certain card types. Tan traveler cards have an immediate effect, usable to switch the strategy or gain some immediate resources - like the Ruins card where you take down the construction from your city to get the resources. Red destination cards provide spaces for workers with interesting effects - in multiplayer games, there are even open destinations where your worker can be played to the opponent’s city, but those are not as usable for solo play. The final type is purple prosperity cards which bring end game bonuses, usually depending on the other cards in your city. They are great to have and can be decisive in turning a seemingly lost game into a victory, but they can be expensive to play, and require a lot of resources. If you focus on collecting a bunch of resources to build a Palace card, for instance, your game might suffer as you will waste a lot of workers to collect those. A better strategy might be to build some less expensive cards first, which would help to lower the cost of the Palace card.

While playing, you might try to focus on achieving special events. Those are usually a combination of two different cards - critter and construction - which bring some end game scoring bonuses. Special events are very important when playing solo, on higher levels of difficulty, as for any unachieved special event, Rugwort will get 6 points. When achieving special events, it’s important to cycle a lot of cards in the meadow and the hand, as it can be hard to locate necessary ones. The Haven location on the map can help when you have a max hand of 8 cards and not enough resources. Some blue governance cards give you an option to draw a card each time you build critter or construction in your city. Also, some basic actions and forest locations enable you to draw multiple cards as well as get some resources while doing so.

While playing solo, you need to remember that Rugwort will always have at least the same number of cards in his city as you have. All his cards are having a value of 2, except the purple prosperity ones which have a value of 3. That, plus the journey score can be a base to compare where you currently at. If possible, you need to try to achieve as many basic events as possible - by playing 3 or 4 cards of the same type in your city. If you don’t get it in time, Rugwort probably will, the next time the season is changed. Also, as mentioned earlier, special events are very important to get, as any you don’t achieve will be worth 6 points to Rugwort. They are also hard to achieve, as it requires a lot of digging through the deck to get to the cards you need for special events.

I have played several solo games of Everdell while learning the rules and preparing for this review. All three levels of difficulty in the solo play do differ by end game scoring (except the highest difficulty, where Rugwort also captures one of your workers). My success rate ranged from beating him 64 against 34, to losing 30 against 47. I felt my success was depending on my initial hand and initial meadow cards on the board. That time when Rugwort really beat me was when I got only the expensive cards available, which prevented me to play a lot of them to my city.

Conclusion

Please note that I have only played it solo so far, so this review is based on the solo experience.

Pros

What I like the most about the game is how you always need to plan which resources to grab next and which cards to play to produce the best possible combo or best possible outcome at the end game scoring. Sometimes the long-running benefit is better than an immediate one, and sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes your opponent ruins your carefully planned 5-moves strategy by taking the card from the meadow or taking the resources you need.

It’s a great feeling when you start with some resources, play a construction, use it to play the critter for free, which then is used in turn to build another construction with a resource discount and ongoing benefit. It’s possible to get big combos this way. Also, with Everdell, you can play for several more rounds after you have deployed all your workers if you have planned the resources and combos well.

As I said several times already, Everdell is beautiful. The artwork is great, the components are great. The rulebook is very good and easy to grasp.

Cons

Now on to the negatives. There are multiple locations one can go during the turn and usually multiple cards available for play if there are enough resources. As mentioned, all the cards have additional rules and benefits. All of this can be a source for the analysis paralysis, especially if the player is not yet familiar with the game.

Everdell is also taking a lot of space. The board is very big and additional space is needed for player cities. You need to have a big table. If you use expansions then you need even more space.

I did enjoy playing solo against Rugwort to some extent, but probably not as much as I would do against a regular human opponent. While your actions change from game to game, Rugwort has just a predefined set of actions and moves, which eventually makes him a boring opponent.

Rating

As a solo game only, I can give Everdell 7. It currently has a rating of 8.0 on BGG. I do believe Everdell is a much better multiplayer game than is solo and hope that I will be able to confirm that soon, and update this rating.

I have all the expansions for Everdell - Pearlbrook, Belfaire, and Spirecrest, which I plan to try and review next. Hopefully, some of those might improve the solo experience of Everdell for me.

Thanks for reading, Critters! Enjoy the game!