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‘The wind is high. The sun is breaking the horizon. It is time to set sail for adventure!’
That’s a pretty apt intro into the Standalone Everdell game, Farshore. Set on the North Coast of the Everdell Valley, this game uses similar mechanics to Everdell and introduces some news bits as well.
Set Up
The aim of the game is to build up you seaside city, the person who scores the most victory points wins, this can be achieved through different methods, which I’ll come to later.
Opening the box you are immediately greeted with the same style amazing artwork and attention to detail in the contents that you find in Everdell. First off you have your four different critter meeples, Crabs, Beavers, Puffins and Ducks. Following this you have the different resources, your shell point tokens, your different ships, lots of treasure tokens and 12 metal Anchor tokens, this doesn’t even get me started on all the other goodies also with the option of a Solo variant to this game.
The set up is fairly straight forward and in most ways similar to Everdell, if you have played that you should find this a breeze, if not then have no fear the ‘Rules of Play’ book inside covers it all very concisely and with plenty of tutorials online, you should have no trouble.
Once all is setup in Farshore, you are good to play, the game consists of four rounds during which you can carry out a variety of actions however you can only do one action per turn. This is broken down in to three possible actions, ‘Place a Worker’, ‘Play a card’, or ‘Prepare for the next season’
- Place a Worker – take one of you Critter meeples and place it upon a specific location, then claiming the resources from said location.
- Play a card – This can be done in one of two ways either from your hand or from the centre of the board, ‘The Bay’, as long as you have the resources available.
- Prepare for next season – Exactly what it says on the tin, collecting your Critter meeples back to you and waiting patiently for everyone to wrap up their turns.
Choosing which action to play can make all the difference as there are limited spaces around the board to place your meeple making it vital to play them at the right time, otherwise somebody may well just beat you to the punch.
You also have the ability to play an Anchor Token, placing it on a construction card to claim a Critter, the restriction with this is that it must be the same type as the construction the Anchor Token is placed on. This will help you build up your city, but be careful you only have three tokens to use.
‘Winds of Change’ I know it sounds like a song from the 80’s but it is a key part to the game, the Windrose tokens change each season and each time you play a card with the matching symbol or name then you can move your ship either one or two spaces depending on what is played.
Final Thoughts
Ok now to the winning part of Farshore, to win you have to be the one with the most victory points at the end, these can be gained from the cards you play (they have a Shell icon with a number on), moving your ship round the board (using the Windrose tiles), treasure tokens collected and lastly Map tile tokens.
Having played Everdell, I find Farshore to be a more streamlined version, ironing out some of those kinks. The artwork and content of the game are sublime and as my wife says “So Pretty”. I like the level of strategy involved you can either go down multiple pathways or just hammer home on one thing. Overall this is a great game for any collection and would recommend this as a medium weight game.
