The Kickstarter for the first Everdell expansion, Pearlbrook, arrived Saturday and we managed to get it to the table the next day!
It had been nearly a year since we last played Everdell, and I had forgotten what a nice game it is. The tableau building mechanics would put in on the same shelf as Terraforming Mars, but it also adds a pleasant amount of worker placement.
On your turn you can do one of three things: place a worker to get resources and/or cards, spend resources to play cards, or retrieve all your workers and move to the next round. There are four rounds (Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall) and each one gets you an additional worker, with two new workers in the last round. The first two rounds are pretty quick, but then the game slows down as your tableau grows and you have more workers to place.
The Pearlbrook expansion adds a “frog ambassador” worker, who's restricted to the five spaces on the expansion board, but will only be placed 4 times over the course of the game. Four of the five locations are hidden until a player reveals them, with a bonus resource for being first. It also adds a bunch of new cards to the main deck, and some additional forest and event cards. Pearlbook replaces the basic event tiles with new 3-D cardboard wonders, which are significantly harder to achieve, but give a large point bonus. Basically if someone gets one of the wonders, you have to get one or more too or it’s going to be hard to win.
Our game lasted about 2.5 hours, including the teach and getting up between turns to make some food. I want to get this to the table again, hopefully well before another year goes by.