Everdell has many of the staples of worker placement games. You gather resources (of four different kinds) and spend them to bring cards into play. The cards represent people and buildings in your village that give you special powers for the rest of the game. The game isn't necessarily a radical departure from other games in the genre, but it does have a unique synthesis of familiar ideas that make the experience distinct and satisfying.
And this one twist, an element I don't recall seeing before Everdell: you can get out of placing a worker on your turn by playing a card instead. You can do this by paying resources, or by working through a "tech tree" in which one card allows you to play the next card in a chain for free. Deferring the placement of your workers has a fun strategic ramification: as long as your workers remain out in play, no player can use the spot they occupy. That, of course, is pretty common in worker placement games, but the ability to draw out the pain for everyone, turn after turn, is an intriguingly cutthroat element in a game that's dressed up in such a cute theme.
Everdell does a great job of making you feel like you're ramping up into a powerful engine. You have just 15 slots in your village to play cards, and at the beginning of the game, you definitely have a feeling that you'll never possibly be able to fill all those slots. But as resource accumulation accelerates, the cards you've already built start to kick in, and you unlock new workers (as new "seasons" in the year arrive), you ultimately reach the point where you think, "wow, 15 slots might not be enough!" It's all on solid mechanical ground.
I don't know that I like the theme all that much, though. The mechanics are quite crunchy and sophisticated for the playful atmosphere of forest animals building in harmony. And that big tree prop is way more trouble than it's worth. It's so large that it can easily obstruct the view of some players... but set it out of the way and then important components are too far out of reach. Also, reserve workers are meant to be kept on the uppermost platform of the tree. Bump the tree (as you inevitably will, several times a game), and worker rain down on the play area and have to be cleaned up. It's a prop that looks cool but makes the game more difficult to play.
There can also be a lot of down time between turns. The overall system isn't too difficult to pick up, but there are a couple of cards in the deck -- particular buildings and characters -- that are quite complicated and/or have complex strategic ramifications. It's a large deck overall, so it doesn't feel to me like the game would have suffered much by, say, excluding the 10% of the cards that cause this extreme brain burn. But of course, it's up to the designer where to spend the complexity chips, and James A. Wilson's choices here have landed him a top 100 game. I'd have preferred a bit of streamlining, but it's hard to say he was wrong.
I'd give Everdell a B+. That is to say that personally, I like it roughly as much as another worker placement game that recently entered the mix with my play group, Coloma. But I feel like more of my group likes Coloma better, enough that I expect Everdell might be crowded out fairly quickly. But if you're a fan of worker placement games, Everdell definitely deserves a look.
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