Dwarfs and Stormtroopers

Welcome to this week’s gaming post! This week I’m discussing a heavy euro and a head-to-head deckbuilder. So without further ado, let’s jump into the recent highlights.

First up is Caverna: The Cave Farmers, a sequel/reimplementation of Agricola. If you’ve played Agricola, then Caverna plays very similar, except Caverna has room tiles instead of cards and more components. In this game, players take turns placing their dwarfs on worker placement spots that allow the player to collect resources, build rooms, collect animals, plant crops, and even forge weapons to go on expeditions.

As with Agricola, at the beginning of each round, a new worker placement spot is revealed. These actions do not vary from game to game, but the order in which they come out will change slightly. This was something I always enjoyed from Agricola – as your farm grows over the course of the game, so does the number of available actions which creates a compelling sense of scale and progression. In one sense, this makes it easier for new players because you just need to teach the actions as they come out; on the other hand, new players may struggle because they won’t have planned for certain actions. I will say that the competition for worker placement spots in Caverna isn’t as punishing as in Agricola.

On a similar note, whereas Agricola can feel very restrictive and punishing, Caverna feels much more like a sandbox game. Feeding is much easier, and instead of getting screwed when the player in front of you takes the one bake bread action in Agricola, in Caverna you can just convert your grain, vegetables, and animals into food when you need it. Also in Agricola, you can specialize in certain areas, but victory points are capped once you reach a certain threshold of the item, and you’ll likely receive a lot of negative victory points for forgoing certain areas. In Caverna, there are still some negative victory points, but it removes the victory point caps, so now if you wanted to focus solely on raising sheep, it’s a much more viable strategy.

I recently played a game where I focused heavily on getting ore and ruby mines early; however, I struggled with food and had to go begging for food (negative victory points at the end). In Agricola, taking a begging card is crippling, but in Caverna, I was surprised to find that it didn’t hurt me that much in the end.

The biggest change from Agricola is replacing the occupation and improvement cards with a large number of building tiles that are all available to all players at the beginning of the game. Getting that initial hand of occupation and improvement cards is my favorite part of Agricola, so when I heard they were being replaced in Caverna, I was resistant to the idea. I like the amount of variety in the building tiles, and all but the basic dwellings have only one copy in the game, so only one player can build each building. In addition, the buildings encourage players to try different strategies. Going back to that play of Caverna I mentioned earlier, I built a building that reduced the amount of food I needed to feed my dwarfs based on how many donkeys I had in mines. However, the choice to make all of the buildings available from the start can be very overwhelming to new players, and overall, I think I still prefer the occupation and improvement cards from Agricola more.

This may be a personal issue, but the rules around where animals can be placed feels unnecessarily complicated. There’s an entire page in the rulebook just dedicated to rules on animal husbandry, and I really wish that a player aid had been included for this because I always have to flip back to that page to remind myself of the exceptions/specifics.

This game is also quite the table hog. There are many more pieces than in Agricola, and it takes a while to setup all of the buildings. Also, the game is playable up to seven players, but personally, I wouldn’t play this with more than four unless you’re prepared for a long game with a lot of downtime between turns.

Agricola is one of my favorite games of all time and was my introduction to modern board gaming. Do I still prefer Agricola to Caverna? It’s hard to say. I really love the occupation and improvement cards from Agricola, but the rest of the game can feel very tight and punishing, and I don’t get that same feeling in Caverna. Personally, Caverna feels like the perfect sandbox game for my tastes. While the buildings can feel overwhelming at the start, almost all are unique and encourage you to specialize in certain areas. Ultimately, I’ll likely find myself coming back to Caverna more often than Agricola for these reasons, but both are among my all-time favorites.

Next up is Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game, a two-player, head-to-head deck building game. One player controls the Rebels, while the other plays as the Empire. Similar to other deckbuilding games like Dominion, each player will draw a hand of five cards at the beginning of their turn which they can play to trigger abilities, buy additional cards from a shared row, and deal damage to the other player’s base. The winner is the first player to defeat three of the other player’s bases, although you can vary this if you want a longer/shorter experience.

One of my favorite parts of the game are the player bases that act as the player’s hit points. Once a player’s base is destroyed, they get to select a new base to put into play each of which provide interesting benefits. For example, one lets you immediately purchase a card for free, while another lets you block the first two damage done to that base each turn.

Another interesting mechanism is the shared row of cards. Players are only allowed to purchase either cards of their faction or neutral cards from the row, so the rebel player wouldn’t be allowed to purchase an Empire star destroyer. Instead of purchasing the other player’s cards, players can use their cards to attack the other player’s card in the row, sending that card to the discard pile and providing a reward to the player that defeated the card.

The box says 30 minutes per game, which I think is fairly accurate when playing to three bases. This makes it easy to play multiple games during a session, allowing players to swap sides for a different experience. However, the Rebels and Empire do not play drastically different from one another. The Empire seems to focus more on generating resources and building large capital ships, while the Rebels have more cards that generate more attack value and force the Empire to discard cards from their hand.

I will say that due to the randomness of how cards come out (there are only ever six cards in the galaxy row at one time), it does make building your deck around certain synergies challenging. In addition, other than the base abilities, there isn’t much of a catch-up mechanism, so if one of the players is able to pick up a very powerful card early (Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker), it can be difficult to come back. I recently played a game as the Rebels where my opponent picked up Darth Vader early, and then used him to defeat Luke Skywalker in the galaxy row. In this scenario, it felt almost impossible to come back from that point as the Rebels don’t have much to try to counter Darth Vader.    

While I enjoy the shared row of cards, it was frustrating when the row became stagnate or got filled up with all of my opponent’s cards. There is an optional rule that allows players to spend resources to get rid of neutral cards from the row, but there is no such similar rule for your own faction’s cards. For example, maybe you don’t want to clog your deck with a low level card, although I suppose you could house rule this.

Finally, for a light game, the rulebook makes things a bit more confusing than I’d like. And this may be a personal thing, but I don’t like how the game doesn’t explain to you who goes first until page 13. It’s also in a small paragraph that’s pretty easy to miss, so it always takes me a minute to find whenever I pull the game out after a bit of a break.

At the moment, I enjoy bringing Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game out occasionally if I’m looking for a light, two-player only game. However, after a couple of plays, I feel like I’ve seen most of what the game has to offer. The game is ripe for expansions, so I’m excited that there’s a clone wars edition on the way. I’m a big Star Wars fan, so hopefully that adds some interesting new abilities to get me excited to pull this one out more often.

With that, I’ll wrap up this week’s gaming highlights! I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the games I’ve mentioned, future content, or format in the comments section below. Happy gaming!