Designer: Uwe Rosenberg
Do you fantasize about being a dwarf, perhaps for their lovely beards and charming drinking songs? Farming pumpkins? Mining ore? Going on quests? Making babies? Keeping donkeys as household pets?
Caverna is a game by the same designer who designed Agricola. Uwe will show up again, but not Agricola – it’s a sprawling flawed game, and Caverna fixes most of those flaws. Players will place workers, which will allow them to expand their farms, harvest food, gather resources, and engage in a little light animal husbandry, but without potentially unbalanced profession cards and with a far less oppressive people feeding mechanism.
Interesting Mechanic: Expanding Action Space Options. That being said, one of the best game mechanics from Agricola does make an appearance, and that is the ever expanding board of actions. Early in the game, there are only a handful of spaces you can place your dwarf. As the game ages, new action spaces which unlock new resources and/or offer greater efficiency become available. As you the player are also unlocking new meeples by making babies, the game continues to be highly contested for the most valuable resources.
Agricola generally gets the ink, but Caverna offers an easier to teach, easier to understand and more balanced gameplay experience for your farming simulator. Also, it has dogs and donkeys, which Agricola specifically lacks.
(Photo Credit: Pokemon Central)
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