This is for #Blogmas 2020 day 28.
For this review, I’m going to assume you already know about how the main game works.
Spirecrest from Starling Games is the second main expansion to Everdell. This one adds yet another extension to the main game board, this time at the bottom, a bunch of new cards to go on this board (none for the main deck), five of large animal creatures, saddles, journey tokens, fox workers as another option to play as and a bunch of walking rabbits, one for every worker animal type there has ever been including all the expansions and extras.
The cards are small and normal sized and split into the four seasons. The small cards are weather cards and each game, one weather card will define what the weather is doing for that season. These cards generally limit what can be done during that season such as much certain actions cost more or even banned outright so new strategies need to be employed. There are only three weather cards per season, but this does give a fair amount of variation. The normal-sized cards are discovery cards, three of which are made available to each player when they end each season, but only one can be claimed each time. These can give certain benefits or rewards and may include one of the new large wooden animals that replaces a player’s worker (who can ride it with the help of the saddle). At the end of each season players also claim one of the journey tokens to keep until the end of the game. Once a player has completed their game, they then send their rabbit along their constructed journey, paying the required costs to score some extra points if they can.
I liked this expansion a lot. The look really compliments an already gorgeous game, the large animals, even if they never get used, look amazing standing on the board. I love how the introduction of the weather can make for a much more varied gaming experience and am looking forward to experiencing there different weather combinations. The discovery cards added a nice little incentive or benefit to the game play and I also appreciated that there were no more cards to add to the main deck, which I feel has enough in it as it is. I did find it a little tough to get the saddles on the big animals and get the worker animals in, but they looked great once done. This game with this expansion takes up quite a bit of table space now, leaving not all that much room left for the players’s cities. This is an even bigger problem if coupled with the other expansion(s). We played on a big table with just this expansion, and space was tight.
This didn’t make the game any more complicated, nor did it add much extra time to the game play. It simply slots in an extra thing each time a player changes season and gives a few extra abilities and scoring opportunities. I can see this being a standard inclusion in all my future Everdell plays.
Final score: Gametastic!
Wyrmberg Games 