Violentvixen
(She/Her)
Got Everdell from the library and tried it out. Not one I'm going to buy or try to teach but I'd play it again if someone else owned it.
The overarching issues were that the instruction booklet is very poor, the cards have a tiny font that's hard to read and the structure of the game isn't really easy to grasp. Before getting together with another couple to play I could tell the instruction manual wasn't too great so we all watched a few quick "how to play" videos. But none of those videos really went through the minutae of what happens on each turn. So the first time we played we completely misunderstood and (for example) our workers kept gathering resources every turn, because we thought that's how it worked and the booklet wasn't really clearly stating things. So no one had any reason to move onto the next season and we were baffled.
Then I found this long video and skipped around to actually see several turns go by and realized how it worked.
So we got together a second time, but still had to stop and Google random videos or look up Reddit threads. There are just weird gray areas or vagueness on how things work. The font is so damned tiny on those cards they absolutely could have clarified a lot of things. Overall we just never felt like the game had a consistent flow, we were jumping all over the place and didn't really have a clear sense of the objective. Then three of us finished Winter while the fourth player was still in Autumn so we just sat there for a while.
Also we made a house rule that it's not just a husband/wife on a farm, you can have a husband/husband or wife/wife pair because it seemed weird not to allow that.
The overarching issues were that the instruction booklet is very poor, the cards have a tiny font that's hard to read and the structure of the game isn't really easy to grasp. Before getting together with another couple to play I could tell the instruction manual wasn't too great so we all watched a few quick "how to play" videos. But none of those videos really went through the minutae of what happens on each turn. So the first time we played we completely misunderstood and (for example) our workers kept gathering resources every turn, because we thought that's how it worked and the booklet wasn't really clearly stating things. So no one had any reason to move onto the next season and we were baffled.
Then I found this long video and skipped around to actually see several turns go by and realized how it worked.
So we got together a second time, but still had to stop and Google random videos or look up Reddit threads. There are just weird gray areas or vagueness on how things work. The font is so damned tiny on those cards they absolutely could have clarified a lot of things. Overall we just never felt like the game had a consistent flow, we were jumping all over the place and didn't really have a clear sense of the objective. Then three of us finished Winter while the fourth player was still in Autumn so we just sat there for a while.
Also we made a house rule that it's not just a husband/wife on a farm, you can have a husband/husband or wife/wife pair because it seemed weird not to allow that.