More about Everdell

Yay! We played 🌳🐾 Everdell yesterday with the new expansion: Newleaf! Spoiler alert: Reni had a landslide victory with a godlike point engine, even though I felt I was doing pretty good too. 😅

Newleaf is a bustling city that has just opened its train station! You get a board extension that gets added to right side of the main board, which depicts the just mentioned station. I absolutely love how the expansion boards get attached to the irregular shaped main board and continue its art. 🥰😍

You of course get a bunch of new Critters and Constructions with Newleaf. 👍 To deal with the even bigger deck you will be placing 3 cards on the new board too, which works similarly to the Meadow - though playing a card from here will get you a bonus tile from the neighboring train car too. There is also a new action that allows you to discard and replenish 3 cards of the Meadow or the Station, then draw 3. This will help cycle the huge deck of cards.

Another new mechanic are the visitor cards - you can draw one of these with a new action. If your city can fulfill their wishes, you will get additional end game points. We did kind of skip using those however, as we didn’t like the faceup cards 😅

Some more inclusions are the train tickets which allow you to move an already placed worker twice per game, and the reservation token (which looks like an amazing wax seal) that allows you to reserve a card to buy it later for 1 resource cheaper. Don’t forget the new forest location cards, plus basic and special events.

📗 A new addition to the Complete Collection that I wanted to highlight is the Gilded Book. This is a combined rulebook containing everything you need to play the base game and every expansion - and The Archive 📕 that is an index for every card in the game.

We really like Newleaf! 🥰 While Pearlbrook and Spirecrest completely shake up the game and change the way you play, Newleaf is a more seamless expansion that expands upon the base game. You get more cards and more ways to cycle cards, but not many new mechanics (though the tickets and reservation tokens are powerful.) So you should be able to include this with any other expansion. 😁