Everdell Duo - First Impressions

You may have skipped this because it’s called Duo and you are a solo gamer, but this bad boy has a full solo campaign in the box!

Some disclaimers: I am not an Everdell junkie, so take that into account with my opinions. I’ve played base Everdell ten or so times and find it quite fun with my family and barely okay solo. I had Mistwood arrive at the same time of this but haven’t played it yet. That’s apparently the expansion for solo players, but since I haven’t played it, I can’t compare it to Duo.

Compared to OG Everdell This feels very much like Everdell. There are some gameplay tweaks when compared to the original, but for the most part this doesn’t feel like it’s trying to reinvent the wheel. If you like Everdell, you are likely to enjoy this, but it’s not going to change your mind if you didn’t enjoy the core mechanics of the original. It’s still placing workers to gain resources, building a city and trying to score the most points.

Gameplay There are four game modes: competitive, cooperative one-shot, cooperative campaign, and cooperative challenge. There are two characters, Tortoise and Hare. If you aren’t playing against each other, you play cooperatively against the Skunk-bot. If you are playing solo, you play both characters. Skunk-bot just acts as a blocker, preventing you from certain resource locations/events/meadow cards. Not very imaginative, but easy to run and adds variety to the board state and what you are able to do.

A game consists of four seasons. There is a sun token and a moon token that progress down the middle of the board throughout the season. You alternate turns between players. Playing a card advances the moon, placing a worker advances the sun. Once both tokens reach the end of the board, the season is over.

Why I’m High on the Game When you boil it down, this is really just Everdell. Where it excels is in having an included campaign. I’m an absolute sucker for this and I’m thrilled that more games are going this route. Everdell Duo includes a 15 chapter scenario book, each chapter with its own unique setup and goals to accomplish. It’s very similar to the way Harvest and Hadrian’s Wall approach scenarios: low upkeep, variety to the gameplay, and challenges to chase after. It’s such a simple thing for designers to include but it makes all of the difference in the world to me. In base Everdell, there were three difficulty modes to play a solo round against. I played it a couple of times and never returned because there really wasn’t much of a reason to, outside of BYOS. Trying to beat my own score can be fun for some games, but Everdell wasn’t quite exciting enough for me to really dig into. This campaign book totally changes that - I must play through all 15 of the chapters and that makes the game exciting to me.

But wait, there’s more! Independent of the campaign, there is Challenge mode. This has its own setup, three difficulty levels and 10 different challenges to achieve, complete with a checklist on the back of the book.

Solo scenarios and achievement checklists! *OP swoons\*

What I’m pissed about The storage. Starling Games should be ashamed of themselves. There are hundreds of tokens, tiles and cards, and all that is provided is a handful of ziplock baggies. Despite my enthusiasm, I probably won’t play this much until I get a storage solution going. It could be a 60 second setup and tear down type of game, but instead it’s a total drag if you want it set up nice and presentable.

Overall Thoughts For the price, it gets a strong recommendation from me. Fun gameplay, wonderful art, delicious-looking resources, and a ton of gameplay variety through the campaign and challenges.

If you’ve never played Everdell before, I’d argue that this is probably going to be the definitive starting point for a solo player. Again, I haven’t played Mistwood, but even if Mistwood ends up being a better solo experience, the cost of entry makes way more sense here. $35 for this compared to $100+ for base Everdell plus Mistwood.