Planning for a cozy winter
🦝 Creature Comforts 🐰 is a light-weight worker placement game. You all play a different animal family, gathering and collecting as many things as possible during spring, summer and fall, to make your winter months comfortable.
🧐 The flow of the game is quite simple - at the start of a round you roll your two family dice 🎲 and decide where to send your 4 workers. This is the biggest issue I had before and also after playing the game: ‼️ many worker spots need specific dice values to be activated. Though you know the value of your 2 family dice, the other 4 neutral village dice that you’ll be able to use too, are only rolled after your decisions. So you could end up with workers that are stuck doing nothing. You do get “lessons learned” tokens to mitigate bad luck in the future, but I find this a very strange design choice. 🤔
☝️There are always 2 meadow and 2 forest worker spots, and a traveler in the inn that keeps changing each round. That way you always have new parameters influencing your decisions. Most spots have to do with gathering resources or converting them. 🧺 There are 6 different resources and also ‘story’ and ‘coin’ tokens so it’s not easy getting what you need. Other spots give you new improvements or comfort cards. 🃏
Improvements provide some ongoing benefits, or serve as a new worker placement spot. Comfort cards are the main victory point source of the game - after your round is over you are free to play as many of these as you have and can pay for. Some cards can combo off of each other or allow you to store resources on them for bonuses.
You play 6-8 rounds (depending on the chosen game length), refreshing the board between them, then you check who scored the most points. 🏆 It’s all quite straightforward worker placement and contract fulfillment, with some twist of the dice. I wasn’t overly engaged during the game, but this is a fun gateway into bigger euros.
🖼️ The aesthetics of the game are incredible, somewhat reminiscent of Everdell. I also love the cute screen printed meeples. The difference between deluxe and retail resources is quite huge though.
