Caverna plus expansion

Plays: 4Px1.

The Game

Caverna is a reimplementation of Agricola. They share many similarities, but are also different in many ways. You are farmers developing your own farms on your individual player boards. You expand your farm, plant crops, harvest them, rear animals, slaughter them for food, and so on. The core game mechanism is worker placement. The main board shows the various actions you may take. You place your worker on a spot to claim it for the round and take the corresponding action, blocking others. Every round a new action space is added, increasing your options. You may get more workers by having babies. This lets you do more per round. The number of rounds is fixed. Every few rounds you do harvesting, which involves harvesting crops, breeding animals, and most importantly feeding your family. If you are unable to provide enough food, you take a stiff penalty. At game end, you score points for many aspects of your farm, and highest scorer wins.

This summarises the similarities between Caverna and Agricola. Now let's look at the differences.

The first difference you'll see is the player board. There are two halves. The left half is a forest. You need to clear trees to make meadows and fields, meadows for animal husbandry and fields for crops. The right half is a mountain. You dig caves and tunnels to expand your dwelling, to create mines, and to install furnishings. Furnishings give you various special abilities and some help you score points. There are many types available, but only one unit per type, so you have to fight for them.

Some spaces have yellow round icons. These are food icons. When you develop a space with food icons, you collect food. Some forest spaces have black boars. Similarly when developing these spaces you claim the boars.

This is the main board. The top part are the furnishings, 48 types in all their glory, which is intimidating for newcomers. Furnishings come in three categories. (1) Orange dwellings are living spaces you need to create before you can have children, i.e. more workers. (2) Green furnishings are resource-type furnishings. They usually help you produce resources, convert resources, or save resources when doing something. (3) Yellow furnishings are scoring-type furnishings. They usually score points based on specific criteria. The bottom part are the action spaces. The actions on the left half are available right from the beginning. The actions on the right half are made available bit by bit, one new action per round.

On the furnishing tiles, the cost to build is at the top left, and the number in the yellow shield is the point value.

These are some of the action spaces. You add resources to some of them at the start of every round. When you pick an action space with resources on it, you claim all the resources.

One mechanism that doesn't exist in Agricola is adventuring. Iron ore can be used to make and upgrade weapons, and your workers can be armed and sent on adventures. In this photo you can see that many workers (coloured discs) are armed and dangerous - wearing helmets with numbers. If you look at the action spaces of the level-9 and level-8 workers, you will see shield-and-axe icons with numbers. These are adventuring icons. When you go adventuring, you get to pick a number of benefits from a list. How many you get to pick depends on the number on the adventuring icon. How many choices you can pick from depends on the weapon level of your worker. The benefits vary. Some are simply claiming a resource. Some let you develop a forest or mountain space. They may not sound like much, but adventuring actually gives you much flexibility. Often the competition is fierce on the main board for what you need to do. Adventuring is like a safety net. You can use it to help you with the area you are most lacking in.

The second card lists your choices when you go adventuring. Let's say your worker is at level 6, and your adventuring value is 2. You will get to pick two different things between 1 to 6. This card is double-sided. This side shows your choices up to level 8. The other side shows the additional choices up to level 14.

The reason I had the opportunity to play Caverna was my fellow gamers wanted to play the expansion The Forgotten Folk, which was released last year. I missed the boat when Caverna was first released. The Forgotten Folk introduces fantasy races. Every player now plays a unique race with its own strengths, weaknesses and quirks. Depending on the races in play, some furnishings are swapped out with race-specific furnishings. Such special furnishings are not restricted to be built by their corresponding races. Anyone can build them, just that generally they will jive better with their corresponding races. The large card on the right was the race I played - the Silicoids. Instead of food, my people ate rocks. I didn't care about food much. I had to worry about rocks instead.

These two cards are elements from the expansion too. Depending on the races in play, new resource types may come into play, like these two.

When developing forest spaces, you usually do two at a time, covering them with a 2x1 tile, one square being a field for crops, and the other square being a meadow. The meadow can later be upgraded to a pasture (i.e. meadow with fences) by flipping the tile over. A pasture holds two animals. A pasture with a stable (the little house) holds four. A stable on a meadow holds one animal. In Caverna you get to keep dogs (but not cats unfortunately). You don't need to worry about living space for dogs. They sleep anywhere and don't run away. In fact, they actually help you with managing sheep. A team of dogs on a meadow guards the same number of sheep plus one. One dog guards two sheep, two dogs guard three sheep, etc. At game end, every animal including dogs score 1VP. This is simpler than Agricola where you need to look up a table to see how many animals of which species score how many VP.

The green leaf icon means harvesting (and feeding your family). From Round 6 to 12, harvesting is not predetermined. You don't harvest every round, and sometimes the harvest works differently. You only get to know whether there is a harvest at the start of the round. There will be one easier harvest, where your family eats less. There will also be one harder harvest, where you must forgo either harvesting crops or breeding animals.

Rubies is a type of resource, and they are worth 1VP each at game end. At any time you can convert rubies to other resources or spend them to develop a space on your board. Normally you can only get cows by trading in one ruby and one food. At game end, you are penalised 2VP for each animal type you don't have. The difference between having no cow (-2VP) and having one (1VP) is 3VP.

The Play

The core game mechanism in Caverna is worker placement. There are many aspects of your farm you need to improve. Many things to do, and many opponents fighting with you over them. When you play Caverna, the difficult choice is always between things you are keen to do, knowing that by picking one, the other will likely be claimed by someone else. Players may pursue different strategies, so eventually actions spaces will have different values to different people. If there is something you need to do, and it's not important to others, you can probably afford to defer claiming the action space.

Broadly speaking, the aspects of your farm you need to manage are crops, animals, mines, expanding your dwellings in order to have more workers, adventuring, and installing furnishings. Occupations cards and Improvements cards in Agricola have become furnishings in Caverna. Unlike the cards in Agricola which are dealt out to players, where everyone can only play from his hand, in Caverna the whole pool of furnishings is accessible to everyone. There is no luck of the draw and you have freedom to decide what to install, but you may have competitors going for the same strategy and the same furnishings. In base Caverna players start on equal footing. Only in the Forgotten Folk expansion you get different starting positions, abilities and handicaps due to the races.

Caverna is a mid to heavy weight game, not something I'd recommend for people new to the hobby. I think it will be overwhelming, especially the furnishings.

Allen, Kareem, Dennis. This copy of Caverna is Kareem's. He has custom storage trays which save some space when playing and also help a lot in packing the game away. This game has a ton of components.

One furnishing I installed gave me free wood for the next seven rounds, thus these wood pieces placed this way on the main board to remind me to collect them in upcoming rounds.

I had many dogs. Two were idle now and were playing in the forest by themselves. One was guarding two sheep. My pasture with a stable could actually keep four sheep. I just hadn't reorganised my sheep yet. The starting dwelling can keep one pair of animals, and I had a boar in my bedroom now (hmm... that doesn't sound right...).

This was Allen's player board. That grey animal is a donkey. You can keep one donkey at each mine.

In the late game, I managed to completely develop every space on my board. On the right I have three tunnel and cave spaces not yet furnished. Caves can be furnished, and tunnels can become mines. Now I had 7 dogs and 9 sheep. My animal husbandry went very well, due to lack of competition. Both Allen and Kareem's races were poor at developing the forest, so they focused their efforts on the mountain side of their boards. Dennis wanted to build the archery range, which needed empty meadows, i.e. no pastures and no animals. I more or less had free rein.

This was the second last round. On the main board, only one last action card was not yet revealed, the one for the final round. Caverna has more harvests than Agricola, 8 harvests over 12 rounds, compared to Agricola's 6 harvests over 14 rounds. However the harvests in Agricola are more difficult. It is not easy to prepare enough food. In Caverna making food is more convenient, and harvests less daunting.

This was Allen's player board. His race was poor at developing the forest, so he mostly worked on the mountain. At this point he had three iron ore mines and two ruby mines. Mines are worth VP. He had only developed three forest spaces.

Furnishings are printed on the furnishing boards so that you know where to place which one. They are organised by category so that it's easier to analyse and compare.

This was Kareem's player board. Some of the tiles on the mountain half were overhanging. This was due to a special ability of his race. He scored points for doing this. The yellow pawn on the right is the start player marker.

This was Dennis' player board. He had three consecutive empty meadows, arranged as such so that he could build the Archery Range and score the full 10VP for it. 10VP is a big deal. Dennis also planned up front to have many children. He built the Couple Dwelling, which could fit two workers. There was only one Couple Dwelling in the whole game and he beat everyone to it. He also built the Additional Dwelling (also unique) which let him have a sixth worker. Normally a player can only have at most five workers.

This was my player board at game end. I won at 99VP. Kareem and Allen's races were conflicting, which made the game tough for both of them, and I became the indirect beneficiary. Not just in animal husbandry but also in crops. At this point I had much fewer dogs and sheep, because I had converted many of them to money. The Sheep Market let me cash in sets of 1 dog and 2 sheep at $4 per set. Normally 1 dog and 2 sheep would be worth 3VP at game end. $4 is 4VP. My $20 was all earned from selling dogs and sheep. The Food Chamber (top right) also helped me tremendously. Every grain + pumpkin pair gave me 2VP. This furnishing gave me 18VP!

The Thoughts

Caverna is a different Agricola. Many things are similar, but there are many differences too. The differences are not superficial. The underlying economy and balance are different. I find it more forgiving. Harvests are not as suffocating. Adventuring is a backup plan you can fall back to if you are acutely short of something. Some things are simplified, like animal husbandry scoring. Also baking bread and cooking meat is easier - fewer steps. Compared with Ora et Labora and Le Havre, Caverna is still the most similar to Agricola. It's not an improved version, nor is it an inferior and gentler version. It's just different.

boardgaming in photos: All Manor of Evil, Carcassonne, Love Letter, Lost Cities

28 Aug 2019. I taught my colleagues Tyle and Jeixel to play Lost Cities, the classic two-player game from Reiner Knizia. This used to be the spouse game. It's only cards with numbers and colours, and yet the master designer has created something that is highly interactive and presents many difficult decisions. When they started playing, I was a little worried they would end up with negative points. In the end they did alright. It was satisfying to see them work out the tactics and to see the strategies click.

30 Aug 2019. A six player game of All Manor of Evil. The previous time I played, it felt impossible to survive till the second clock card was drawn from the deck. This time, the game ended with the second clock card. So it is not that impossible after all. I guess the first time I played we had more people incentivised to awaken one of the elder gods. This time round, only Ivan was desperate to awaken an elder god. For some others it was nice-to-have but not life-and-death. I needed to survive till the second clock card, and I tried to remove awaken tokens from the elder gods as often as I could.

We created a convention. The action card picked in the previous round, which may not be picked in the current round, is placed face-up in front of the player, so that everyone can clearly see it. Once the action card for the current round is picked, it is placed face-down and sideways overlapping the previous round card. It is easy to glance around the table to see if everyone has picked a card for the current round.

This was still early game - not many awaken tokens on the elder gods. Later on things became much more precarious.

In this particular game I used the #4 action frequently to get more treasures. The #4 action lets you claim the top card from the deck if it is a treasure. The risk is it might not be a good one, e.g. it might come with a high insanity value. I needed to get to the second clock card, so drawing more cards from the deck was good for me. In the second half of the game, I sensed that I probably had more victory points than everyone else, but I knew I was also high in the insanity department. I tried to discard insanity tokens, but unfortunately by game end I still had too many. As the game ended, only Ivan was eliminated due to his character traits. Of the five left, I had the most insanity, so I was next to get eliminated. I counted my victory points, and had I not gone crazy, I would have won. Too bad!

31 Aug 2019. I came across this Agricola phone wallpaper on social media. Unfortunately it didn't fit my phone well. The alignment is a little off.

4 Sep 2019. I taught my colleagues Love Letter. They had a lot of fun, even those watching. We used paper clips as score markers. Love Letter is a microgame with only 16 cards, but it does take some effort to teach, especially when explaining some of the interactions of the card powers. It is a joy to watch new players pick up the intricacies as they play.

9 Sep 2019. It had been four years since I previously played Carcassonne. I used to play a lot of Carcassonne, with my wife Michelle and with my Taiwanese friends. Over the years I have collected many expansions, big and small. What was new to us this time was the Half and Half expansion, from Spielbox magazine. This expansion features half tiles - the triangular tiles. There's one in the middle of this photo. At the start of the game, every player gets two half tiles. On your turn, you may forgo drawing a regular tile and play one of your half tiles instead. In the photo above, that completed castle on the right previously had one of my regular meeples. It had been stuck there for a long time because I couldn't draw the right tile to complete the castle. On the left, Michelle's (red) big meeple was eyeing my incomplete castle. If her incomplete castle and mine joined up, she would win majority and score, and I would get nothing. By playing my half tile I completed the castle on the right and released my meeple. I also locked up Michelle's big meeple because she didn't have the right half tile to play into that triangular space to complete that castle with her big meeple. This was terribly mean of me, locking up her important big meeple for the rest of the game.

I think the Half and Half is just so-so. The half tiles are helpful. You can save them for a crucial moment. However I think a big part of the fun of Carcassonne is hoping to draw something that's useful to you. So I find such a kind of better control unnecessary. So Half and Half is nice if you want to have a bit of variety, but it's just a novelty and is not necessary.

boardgaming in photos: China, Samurai Spirit, Agricola, Through the Ages

27 Feb 2015. China is my favourite Michael Schacht game. I have played its predecessor Web of Power, but only once or twice, on the internet, and I don't remember what I thought about it. My copy of China is the version published by Uberplay, which I like a lot, especially the box cover. Uberplay has closed down many years ago, which is a pity. They had some pretty decent games and had good production quality. The latest version of China is called Han and is published by Abacusspiele.

In the 5P game we played, many were new to the game. They remembered to block me (green) from making long road connections (4 or more linked houses). You can see that on the right side my chain of three houses had been cut off by the yellow and blue players. The purple player was new but had succeeded in forming a scoring chain. Five houses now, and no sign of anyone blocking her yet. At game end I managed to win, mainly because of points from the emissaries. This is an aspect which new players often fail to fully utilise, despite reminders when teaching the game.

1 Mar 2015. This was the first time I won a game of Samurai Spirit fair and square - I am sure I got all the rules right this time. It was a close thing - I had only one farmhouse left in the village. However I did have two barricades still standing which would have helped protect it. I didn't use the solo rules in the rulebook. I controlled 4 samurai and used the normal rules. I think fewer than four samurai makes the game less interesting.

All four of my samurai had transformed into beast form, which I think is important. But then of course you'd need to be careful not to let them take much more injury. Games can be easily lost this way. Any samurai getting killed means an instant loss.

I played the normal difficulty level. It is tough enough. I don't feel ready for the next level yet. Just reading the rules makes me dread it. At the next difficulty level, whenever a farmhouse is razed, you need to apply the penalty specified at the back of the farmhouse token.

14 Mar 2015. Michelle suggested Agricola, which she hadn't played for quite a while. Of course I said yes. This was one of our spouse games which we played heavily for a period. My previous few games of Agricola had always been with the children, and we used the family game rules, i.e. no minor improvements and no occupations. Now that I played the normal game again, I suddenly found the minor improvements and occupations rather overwhelming. There was so much more to think about, so many more possibilities to consider.

Through the Ages is another one of our spouse games. Bringing it out is like reminiscing about old times. It's always fun to give it a spin once in a while. I read that there's a new version coming out this year, probably with some streamlining.

We play with an unwritten rule - no aggression or wars. So the leaders, wonders and techs we pick tend to be not related to military. However military still comes into play, because it often determines how events affect you, and you also need it for colonisation. So playing peacefully doesn't mean you'll lose too big a chunk of the game (but you do lose some).

In this game I managed to put together the Michelangelo + St. Peter's Basilica combo, which is a powerful scoring combo in mid-game. The Hanging Gardens helped greatly in this combo too. Later an event card seeded by Michelle caused my Hanging Gardens to go out of fashion, so I lost the two smiley faces and the bonus four culture points per turn.

boardgaming in photos

27 Oct 2014. Allen, Han, Jia Yaik and I started a game of Indonesia on Slothninja quite some time ago, and the game took about half a year to finish. I took some screenshots during our game, and had intended to write a session report about it. When I looked back at the screenshots, it looked like too much work to analyse every twist and turn and to try to remember what was going through my mind during the game. So I've decided to forget it. Here's one screenshot of the map.

Han was the big winner in this game, and the signs were already showing in the early game. He played a smooth game. Indonesia is an unforgiving game. You need to know what you're doing. If you dig a hole for yourself, it's not easy to climb out. It feels like you have many crucial decisions to make throughout the game, and one bad decision can set you back a lot. There will be big changes throughout the game - people losing companies due to mergers, rice companies and spice companies transforming into siap faji (microwave meals) companies. These changes are not brought about by random dice rolls or lucky card draws. They are all part of a natural progression driven by player actions. The challenge is in how to anticipate and shape the events in the game.

Half a year to play a game is crazy though. Next time we should play face-to-face.

26 Oct 2014. Hacienda is a Wolfgang Kramer design which both Michelle and I like. Many people have made custom maps for it, but till now I still haven't downloaded any to play. By now Hacienda is no longer a hotness game.

Hacienda is a tile-laying game. You buy cards, then play cards to place tiles. You also directly pay to place some special tiles. Tiles placed help you make money or give you victory points. Points are scored once at mid-game and then again at game end. The hexes are haciendas or farms. The round tiles are animals. The lakes are a type of tile you can place too. They score points for your haciendas and animals next to them.

Michelle and I always compete to reach as many markets as possible using our animals. The markets are those single buildings in the middle of the grassland (pampas) areas. Creating a link of animals to markets lets you earn money, and each market you connect to is also worth victory points. The more you connect to, the higher the value per market. So Michelle and I always strive to not get left behind.

In this game, I won mainly because of lakes. I had started placing them earlier, and had also managed to place more than Michelle.

Michelle expanded her (red) haciendas aggressively, until she ran out of red hexes. So she had to use yellow ones instead. This was game end.

Playing my homemade Love Letter with the children. This is one of Chen Rui's (left) favourite games.

Agricola. We still play the family game rules, i.e. no Occupation cards or Minor Improvement cards. The children still don't quite have that strategic view and are not yet able to plan ahead very well. So I sometimes need to remind them and give them little tips. But I think they do enjoy building up their farms.

This is my farm. Not all that great. I have a fancy stone house, but my animal husbandry is rather poor - only one tiny pasture and a few shabby stables.

Shee Yun's animal husbandry is much better. She has all three types of animals (the cubes), sheep, wild boar and cattle.

Chen Rui's farm has too much unutilised space, but she does have a nice stone house.

29 Oct 2014. This is a homemade version of Reiner Knizia's En Garde. I did this quite a long time ago. The game is very simple and very quick, but at the same time it fits the fencing setting very well.

The fencing ground is on the left, the scoreboard on the right. The black and white markers on the left are our contestants, the ones on the right are the score markers. In this game you play cards to move or to attack. The number on the card determines how many steps you can move or from what exact range you may attack. Defense is done by playing a card (or cards) of a matching number. A round ends as soon as one contestant manages to score a hit. That's one point for him. If the deck (which has only 25 cards, five each of numbers 1 to 5) runs out, whoever is further from his starting corner wins the round.

Very few components required, yet it is a very clever game.

I taught Shee Yun (9) Caesar and Cleopatra. This is a game a bought about 10 years ago in Taiwan. I had not played it for a very long time. I only thought about it when I was browsing my shelf to look for games I could teach Shee Yun.

In this 2-player game, players compete to grab Roman officials from the centre. There are 5 types of officials, and every turn there may be an event triggering one of them to decide to support one of the players. You play numbered cards on your side of the officials groups, and whenever there is a reckoning, whoever has the highest total wins one official. You can play cards face-up or face-down, but if you play face-down, you only get to play one card, as opposed to two when playing face-up. Shee Yun was reluctant to reveal her cards and kept playing them face-down. That was not a good idea. She ended up playing much fewer cards than me. You always draw back up to your hand size at the end of your turn, so there is no need to conserve cards.

In addition to numbered cards, there are also special action cards, like the rightmost one here. There is one special type of numbered card called a Philosopher card. It is worth 0, but it changes the rule for the next reckoning. The player with the smaller total value wins instead.

31 Oct 2014. Sticheln is an old trick-taking game which I quite like. It has two features which make it very interesting. There is a pain colour (or suit) that you must select at the start of every hand. Each card you capture is worth one point, but if you capture cards of your pain colour, they are worth negative points based on the card value. The other interesting feature is for every trick, any colour played that is different from the colour of the first card played is a trump colour. This means it is quite rare for the first card to win any trick, because as soon as someone else plays a different colour, that new colour will trump the first card.

When playing Sticheln you need to be careful not to win cards of your pain colour while winning as many other coloured cards as possible. It is important to watch others' pain colours, because sometimes you do want to serve them a good dose of pain. You manipulate your opponents' fears to allow you to win tricks. You appeal to their greed to help you get rid of your pain colour. What an evil game!

Allen, Ivan and Ainul. We played at Boardgamecafe.net. I arrived early and there were only three of us initially. Since we were waiting for others to arrive, I suggested playing one quick round of Sticheln. Halfway through sorting out the cards needed for a 3-player game and explaining the rules, another friend arrived. We asked him to join us, and we re-sorted the cards and restarted the game explanation. Then halfway through that, yet another friend arrived, whom we invited to join us too. This repeated a few times until we had 8 players - the max the game could support. This was my first time ever playing 8-player Sticheln. It's probably not the best number, but it was funny to have tried it this way. The big numbered cards are scary! Negative twenty?! Oh yeah...

I have played River Dragons (Dragon Delta) with my family before as a 4-player game. That time Shee Yun won within two rounds as we were not prepared to stop her. This time I played this as a 6-player game, all players being boardgame veterans. The game was, needless to say, quite different from my previous experience. A more crowded board meant we got into each others' ways more easily. Then the other thing is we had no qualms with programming dragon cards to mess with one another. A dragon card cancels an opponent's action, which can severely mess up his programmed sequence of moves.

That black #2 bridge looks dodgy. Looks like a government project going nowhere.

Guess who's the ninja.

We built quite a complex mishmash of bridges. Dith was the eventual winner. In that last round, we could have played dragon cards to stop him, but we were all hoping someone else would do it, so that we could save one action. Our selfishness worked against us and allowed Dith to complete his final dash.