Everdell Journeys Preview | A New Tabletop Adventure of Strategy, Travel & Tableau Building!
Transcript
Thanks for joining us today as we take a look at a brand new game called Everdell Journeys that is coming to crowdfunding soon from Tycoon Games.
As always, we want to make sure you're aware that our crowdfunding videos are sponsored in part by our own Kickstarter backers, as well as by the creators of this game.
Hey again, thanks for joining us at Tantrum House Studio 3. I'm Will
Medows.
And I'm Starling Medows, and today we're previewing the game Everdell Journeys. This is from designers James and Clarissa Wilson, and it features art from Lucas Sigman.
This is a new addition to the Everdell world, and it's kind of, I think, their first departure from worker placement type games. This is is a tableau building game. This time we're going to be traveling along as we go, and I don't know, just adds some some new mechanics that we've never seen before. This is for one to six players, and let's go ahead and just jump in and explain how the game is played.
To set up the game, you'll lay out the main board, shuffle the deck of cards, and randomly select the round goal tokens for the game.
Then you're going to give each player not a set of adorable little wooden meeples, but in this case an actual cute little mini figure. You'll also give them three journals. They'll get to keep two. You'll give them five fires. You'll give them their mug and score token, and you'll deal them eight cards.
This is a card drafting game, so players will simultaneously be selecting a card from their hand, playing it to their tableau, and then passing them to their neighbor.
After each card is played, you then must decide if you want to travel. Traveling to a new card will take time, represented by your campfire. You must extinguish the number of campfires shown on the card, plus if you are traveling from one type of terrain to a different type, you'll have to pay one additional campfire.
You'll then immediately collect the rewards shown at the top of the card. This could be reigniting some of your fire, gaining victory points, adding new journals to your collection, or collecting cheers back at the pub for your tales of adventure.
If you collect enough cheers, the bards will sing songs about your journeys and give you bonuses plus in-game scoring points.
Players will continue passing and playing until everyone has played five cards to their tableau. Then everyone will head back to the pub to collect cheers for the round plus the previous rounds, and then players will compare their fame with the other players to their left and either claim additional points or relight a fire.
Players will repeat the process two more times, and then at the end of the game, players will reveal the journals they have been able to complete along with the song cards they have collected and any cards that have in-game scoring on them, and then the player with the most points wins. So, while Everdell Journeys does depart from the traditional worker placement style games that we've seen in the rest of the Everdell universe, it does feel very consistent with their other games. You are going to be building that 15-card tableau. The art from Lucas, he's the same illustrator who did Silverfrost, so that feels consistent. We're introducing some new ideas and new mechanics and new icons and things, but if you're a fan of the Everdell games, this is a uh new entry that's going to feel familiar even though it offers a lot of brand new stuff.
The game uh has three different terrain types on the cards, um and those will determine when you switch back and forth between them. You'll have to pay extra as you move on your journey. Um there's also some caravan cards. Those don't have a terrain type, so you'll simply look um before and after those cards when you play them.
Now, one of the things that we haven't mentioned is that you can on your turn decide to rest. So, if you don't have the campfires necessary to be able to flip over and pay the difference, what you do on your turn instead is lay your little mini guy over, you relight three of your fires, and then that gives you another opportunity to collect one of those journals. And the idea behind those journals is that these are things that you want to see along your journey. And so, any of the cards that you've traveled to will help you like qualify or whatever accomplish the things that are shown in those journals. You can only have three journals at a time, but as soon as you complete them, you'll flip them over and then those will be stored separately for your in-game scoring.
Yeah, this is the type of game where everybody is scoring points along the way, but it is still a surprise who wins at the end because of those journals and the song cards.
Yeah, you do also have some cards in your tableau that'll have in-game scoring on it. And those almost every time in the game you're going to be comparing yourself to your neighbor on the left. And so, if you have more symbols of this certain type than they do, that's another good way to score points. Sometimes that point gap, like she was saying, is pretty shocking at the end because I've accomplished all of my goals and I've got 50 extra points at the end of the game that you didn't see coming. Uh but, the nice thing about the rest of the game is that everybody's kind of hopping along the board pretty consistently together. And that's kind of in my personal opinion, one of those things that you enjoy when there's like that surprise ending. You didn't know if you were winning or losing the entire time.
Um one way we haven't talked about that changes the game play play completely is instead of playing a normal drafting game, you can play a longer version of this game by setting out a market more similar to the original Everdell. And players will be selecting cards from the market to play one turn at a time instead of simultaneously play with the drafting.
Yeah, so if you're looking for an even more familiar experience, that is going to be similar to the Everdell game where you've got eight cards laid out on the table and you're picking one each turn to add to your tableau. It's going to slow the game down. This is a one to six player game, so the simultaneous drafting is going to be a lot faster, but you might have a little bit more of a strategic feel to it if you can kind of see what cards are out there, what your neighbor's going to pick, what you're going to pick, and then it, you know, refreshes only one card after each card, you know, is taken. So, you're going to be able to plan out a little bit more what you want to do. Um also, another thing we didn't mention is that as you lay the cards out in front of you, if you don't travel to them, then you can actually still rearrange those cards. So, the game does have a lot of strategy in it, even though you're picking the best card out of the hand, even when you play it to your tableau, you still have the opportunity to rearrange things until you travel to them, and then it's going to be locked in.
Yeah, and you are allowed to travel to multiple locations on your turn if you have arrested several times um along the way to refresh your campfires. So, some new players we have noticed felt like they were behind other players, but you are allowed to journey as far as you would like on your turn.
And there are plenty of other fine-tuned rules that we didn't necessarily mention in the game. However, if this sounds like the type of game that you'd enjoy, we definitely recommend that you check out Everdell Journeys from Tycoon Games. And then as always, thank you guys so much for tuning in, following along, liking our videos here at Tantrum House.