Review – Everdell Emerland

Everdell Emerland is the 6th standalone Everdell spinoff, taking the beloved series into the jungle this time around. Its use of double-sided, upgradeable cards make it unique mechanically, but is it different enough to justify its own expedition, or should it have stayed at basecamp? 

If you missed our original review of Everdell, check it out here. 

Review

A few key differences between Everdell and Emerland:

• Hand limit is 6, city limit is 12 (but can be increased with Realms, the new Events). 
• Duplicate cards in the shared hand get stacked, a change introduced in other variants and one I’d suggest for any Everdell game. 
• Each player has an Archeologist who can explore Jungle Ruins, gain Artifacts, and eventually reach the Lost City for major points. 
• Helpers (insects) can accompany Workers to action spaces to allow the Worker to perform the action twice or while another player’s Worker is present–or both if your Worker is accompanied by 2 Helpers. 
• Artisans are an all-new card type that allows you to tuck a card from your hand behind them in order to take their action. 
• Cards are double-sided, allowing you to upgrade both constructions and critters (there is no common/unique designations). 
• Harps can be gained and placed on an upgraded construction to play an upgraded critter for free. You can only place a Harp on each type of construction once. 

Some welcome additions are certainly the upgradeable cards. It’s fun to find a card you really like and upgrade it quickly so you can build your whole strategy around it, and some of those upgraded cards are really, really powerful. Also, for player actions, there are still the basic resources locations, but there’s also another location that features 4 dice that get re-rolled every season: when you place a Worker there, you can choose 2 of the 4 dice faces. This is fantastic game design because it’s low upkeep and keeps the additional resources fresh without locking them in for a full game. 

Take-or-leave additions include Helpers and the Jungle Ruins track. Helpers added a layer of complexity in that it’s another worker type to manage and offers additional options for you on your turn, but they also pave the way for analysis paralysis. The Jungle Ruins track looks really cool, but I wish you weren’t restricted by what season you’re in—why not allow players to bust it and get to the end quickly if they’d like? The race factor didn’t land with me, and for whoever went first, it almost always felt like a no-brainer to advance on the track for the easy 2+ VPs and pull from the treasure bag, which could offer up to 5 additional VPs. 

Additions that detracted from our enjoyment of the game were the general difficulty we felt in playing cards into our city and the Realms. With more options, it felt like more of a chore to build up resources to play a card, especially with the emerald requirements (a new type of resource, in addition to the aforementioned Harps and 4 basic types). For the Realms, they’re attainable for each player once a round so long as a player has 2 emeralds. The problem with this is that you can’t build up to them because if another player sees you building up to one, they’ll just buy that Realm to keep you from getting a ton of bonus points, whereas in Everdell you have to meet the necessary requirements for the event before you can claim it, so it’s more of a race.

Exceptional is the standard for the quality of components in Everdell, and Emerland is no different. We received the Collector’s Edition, and as you can see from the pictures, Tycoon Games delivers. The Archeologist critter looks especially cool, with a full-color side, and the 3D Jungle Ruins replaces the Evertree as the table-presence torchbearer. Anyone interested in animals will enjoy shuffling through the illustrations, and the solo mode is the most robust I’ve seen since Mistwood. 

Emerland is a good game with solid mechanics: the double-sided cards add a layer we haven’t seen in Everdell before, and the 4 dice constantly keeping resource-selection fresh is perfect. My only problem with Emerland is that it isn’t Everdell. It’s not as smooth, not as easy to teach, and not as enjoyable (for me) to play, even if there’s a decent number of technical arguments one could make for it being the “better” game. 

Tycoon Games (Asmodee North America) kindly provided a review copy.