Good day today with two nice games played…very busy in the Halls again!

Evenfall
This is a great meaty game from DLP and Nanox games – it’s a card driven worker placement game which I really enjoyed. In your turn you are placing your limited supply of witches on Regions which generally allow you to buy cards which can produce resources when you harvest them. They  are placed in an upper row of cards next to your player board. This row is known as the outer circle and is, like the regions themselves, only accessible to witches.  There is a lower row or inner circle where a further 4 elder witches can access cards but they are too infirm to travel elsewhere. The top row can only be harvested once per round so timing is tricky as you wish to harvest regions before you move these cards down to your inner circle where more of your witches can use them.

Meanwhile you are not only getting resources from harvesting but you are also drawing cards. These cards may either be placed on a region (1 per card) or some may be played as characters which give you one of two sorts of abilities which will help you score pours at the end of the game  or do other fancy stuff. The cards can be discarded to generate resources two and the game and the cards are beautifully designed so that you have some delicious decisions to make as to what to do with them. Some cards have actions spaces for witches on them which is why you would like to move them down to the inner circle and some cards just give your instant resources or benefits.

The game is not that easy to describe briefly but I was very very taken with how the cards are designed to work together and to be interesting. All in all I really enjoyed playing this and bought a copy immediately. Definitely one to look out for.

Next up was Karvi, the new game from Hand in Gluck. The these here is one of Vikings; so there is a map showing locations out of Norway to which your ship travels at the cost of provisions – which are hard to come by. Meanwhile the main mechanic of the game takes place on another board – here players will take turns moving around a rondel using the mechanic where the last player moves first, and can take all actions until they overtake another player. The twist here is that spaces you land on have costs between 1-3 and each player has two dice marked from 0-5. Each space you land on, you pay pips to use the action there, so that eventually your dice dwindle to zero. Luckily there are paces to boost your dice back up and tokens and cards that you get from your travels in the ship or from various actions in the (very large) rondel allow you to find ways around the limitations the game mechanics bring. The result isn’t an intriguing puzzle where you try to figure out what’s best to do when. I found the cards you collect and the action choices in the rondel engaging and strategic and while the theme is largely very Euro the game felt interactive and competitive.