If you’re new to Everdell, I would say you should stick to the base game or the Bellfaire expansion and hold off on Spirecrest. It was exciting, but why must the inclusion of a River eradicate celebrated Events and thrust play in one specific compass direction? You reveal the 3 cards in a row left to right, but if you want the middle card, you’ll have to discard a card or a resource, and if you want the card on the right, you’ll have to discard 2 of any resource/card combination. This notion of weighing the pros and cons is also applicable to the act of deciding on which Discovery card to acquire. The player then reveals three Discovery Cards from the corresponding trail pile and places them at the bottom of the board.

Collect enough pearls and you can construct fabulous wonders and adornments, to make your city the pride of Everdell! The work of city building finished, with every uncertainty laid to rest, nothing remains but to enjoy the splendid scene and leave the critters to their new home in relative peace. However, Spirecrest injects a sense of the unexplored, as players now undertake a journey through the rocky outcroppings to the south of the meadow.But for those who do in fact enjoy playing Everdell in solitaire and want to add just the right amount of complexity and new mechanisms, then I wholeheartedly recommend taking a closer look at the Spirecrest expansion.

The second edition of Spirecrest includes 8 big critters, but you’ll likely only see a few of them per game. After each season, the rabbit progresses in the exploration, and you can choose a journey token from the few that are available. Instead, it’s a series of open doors and, increasingly with the player count, better scoring opportunities.Spirecrest adds several exciting and challenging new mechanics and features to the Everdell base game.

Expanding the city capacity from 15 to 17 is an understated design decision that allows for greatness but still leaves players wanting to try again. If you’ve ever played Viticulture, it is similar to the Grande Worker or the Special Workers in Viticulture: Tuscany Essential Edition. This massive expansion introduces beautiful new scenery, another oversized specialized meeple—the Rabbit Traveler, several tokens and cards, and, of course, the OVERsized (and wonderfully adorable) Big Critters.It also introduced the first oversized and specialized meeple—the Frog Ambassador, a specialized resource—the Pearl, and a game-changing substitution in the Wonders. The leftmost card may be free of charge on your behalf, but it is also the case that the scruffy old rat will receive three point tokens whereas the rightmost Discovery card grants your rodent opponent a mere one point to be tallied during the end-of-game scoring. If you secured the Collector’s Edition, you are given three extra Big Critters: Truffle the boar, Corliander the peacock, and Firebeak the vulture. It introduces cards that make your actions a little more difficult and then a second set of cards that give you extra benefits. Everdell: Spirecrest builds upon Everdell’s core card-drafting and worker placement engine, adding a stack of new cards and new mechanics to the base game.

Regardless of the merits, I knew from the start that Bellfaire would have to appeal to me somewhere other than the player count. I wish there had been an option, since all of the expansions are nearly the same thickness, for a reasonable box for the base game that left a couple inches at the top to slip an expansion insert inside. I’m not the sort that necessarily wants to see myself or my handwriting in a (non-legacy) game, so the custom cards are not that appealing to me.When reviewing a game it’s really hard not to compare it to other games that share a key mechanism or theme. Pearlbrook was the first box expansion to see the light of retail day after the base game and Collector’s Edition. Take for instance the mighty bear Honeypaw, who when deployed onto a basic or Forest location gains berries in addition to the resources of the location in question. A contributing factor to my positive feelings towards this most recent expansion to Everdell lies in the fact that James A. Piper at the Gates of Dawn is, pound for pound, one of my favorite chapters ever written for its ability to chronicle something undeniably larger than life as we know it.