Playing – Stardew Valley

We recently had a downtime from our current Dragonlance campaign so played some four player games.

The Pitch

A cozy co-operative board game that echoes the video game that it’s based on. You and your fellow players take actions to satisfy the randomly determined goals of making friends and produce before all four seasons are finished. You get a role (farmer, miner, forager, fisher, etc.) and a special tool to do your job, plus you can get other special abilities and equipment for bonuses as the seasons go by and materials are mined.

It’s great to be playing an IP where as players you can share stories about how certain cards and mechanics connect to the source material, and this is one of those games. It has many small but solid pieces. We substituted meeples for the plastic pawns as the pawns were the one part that didn’t seem to click in with the rest of feel.

The design of the game made me happy. I’m a big fan of board games that make an effort to have trays that actually work and fit all the pieces. I would have liked to see covers for those, but as long as the box doesn’t get tipped on it’s side to fit on the book case, things should stay sorted. The plants are color coded according to season, making it pretty easy to sort those out when putting things away. The board has a key to the symbols for what happens on each of the season cards, located right beside the place for the season card deck. Depending on how long you want a game to be, you can adjust the number of cards for each season. Our game went a bit long (2+ hours, but we went at it pretty casual) but it didn’t seem to be dragging.

A mechanic we probably didn’t take advantage as much of as we should of was foraging. As the start of the player turn, we talk about our plan and place our meeples on a location for our first action. This limits what the second of two actions might be as you can either do two where you are or move down a path to the next location for an action there. If there are tiles adjacent to that path, you can forage one (or more if you have the right talents) to add to your inventory. It might be valuable on it’s own or maybe useful as a gift to make a friend. In the game I was in, we either did a double action where we were or travelled the path to the town centre for buying / selling / making friends so those forages cleared qucikly but much did not. If we had a fourth player with the Forager role, maybe we would have done more, but each of us was pretty focused on the talents and tools we had for farming, fishing, and mining.

The majority of victory conditions was dependent on the number of players, like generating 6 coins per player or 3 hearts donated per player or one fall plant per player, so it scaled in difficulty with adding another player. We discovered that there wasn’t enough hearts included in the box for one of the conditions so improvised with some wooden hearts from the dollar store to create some pieces worth three hearts.

I’d gladly play it again!