I could probably write a thesis on how much I love Everdell. From its table presence with the big tree to the squishy berry components to the card art, it’s truly a gem. On the boughs are placed cards and seasonal workers. The tree trunk holds the massive deck of cards and scattered at the bottom are important event tiles. Across the river, a collection of beautifully produced resources: squishy berries, crystalline resin, smooth pebbles, and twigs. Beneath the resources, serving as a shared marketplace, are critter and construction cards that feature some of the prettiest art I’ve seen in any game. From this point it’s a relatively easy-to-understand worker placement game with a tableau building aspect. Place a worker and collect the benefits, or play a card from your hand or the shared marketplace, or move onto the next season, which fetches your workers and gives you more to work with. I always love when turns are distilled down to two or three options -it’s probably why I’m so fond of worker placement games.

I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of what each worker space does, but I will touch on a few details that are unique. First, once a construction is acquired, there’s a tag in the lower right that dictates what critter it can be paired with (and also stated in the upper left of critter cards). For free. Have a farm in your city? Well you can play the Husband or Wife from your hand or the marketplace for free. Free I tells ya! This is one of the critical aspects of the game that can really break impulsive people like me (Also I love free stuff). I’ll explain why after I mention the second pivotal detail: the city.

The city is what makes Everdell so distinct from other worker placement games. As you acquire critters and build constructions, you start by placing the easiest, cheapest, most immediately beneficial cards. But be careful, because your city can only hold fifteen critters and constructions and removing them once they’ve been placed is a very difficult task. You can’t just burn down the farm because you don’t need the stupid berries anymore. But now that you have it, well it sure is awful tempting to acquire the Husband. It is free after all. I mean free, if you have the extra space. Fifteen cards in your city sounds like an awful lot and you’re not using that empty space right now anyway...

Everdell is filled with decisions that seem innocuous at first, but by Autumn will have you scratching your head and lamenting your past choices while anxiously wondering if you can complete your masterpiece before the game is over.

James and I played this at two and four players, and we enjoyed both equally. My only knock is the tree with its boughs full of cards, while beautiful, will almost certainly wear quickly with repeated setups. Still, every other aspect of the game is, to put it in critter terms, pawfect.