Caverna: The Passive-Agressive Cave Farmers

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A wild board game post appeared!

cavernaWe finally got around to playing Caverna the other day. I’m still not entirely sure who won though since we never tallied up the points at the end.  I know people joke about (or maybe not) how you shouldn’t play some games because they ruin friendships but I never expected a game about farming and digging to be one of them. I’m of course being a bit over dramatic here since at most things escalated into passive-aggressiveness but you get the idea. Plus all of this went down between two “grown” men while their mother sat next to them wondering where she went wrong. Sorry mom.

Anyway, the basic idea behind Caverna: The Cave Farmers is that you are in charge of a family of dwarves that mine and dig and sometimes go on expeditions. It’s made by the same guy who did Agricola and from what I hear it’s essentially Agricola 2.0 or whatever. I can’t really comment since I never played that game. The game gives you a lot of freedom when it comes to playing so if you are really interested in farming and raising animals you can do that or if you want to try clearing out your mountain and mining you can also go for that. Basically the idea is to have the most points by the end of the game.

Each player takes a turn placing their dwarf pawns on specific action squares. Some let you clear our the forest and lay down meadow/soil tiles, dig tunnels/caverns, collect resources, or forge weapons. There are a lot of options and usually the best ones will get snatched up first. At the end of some rounds there is a harvest event which usually means collecting any planted crops, breeding animals, and feeding all of your dwarves so you don’t have to take a begging token. Each turn a new card is revealed with a new type of action you can take. Like right away you can’t forge a weapon but the action will show up sometime in the first (I think) phase of the game. After 12 rounds of this the game ends and points are awarded for things like animals, crops, additional dwarves, specific furnishing and buildings, and bonus points.

I didn’t do a great job of explaining the rules, which to be fair were a little daunting at first. I spent what felt like hours just punching out tiles, sorting everything, and reading up on things. Things started to heat up a little when Keen got annoyed by the first player mechanic. To further explain things, the first player always gets to play his pawn first so he gets to pick the best actions to take. In order to become the first player you have to place on pawn on the square that lets you become first player for next round. Keen thought that this would make us just trade places in the turn order and got fairly annoyed when I tried to explain that it always goes from first player to the left, which essentially meant that he went from being 1st to last. Then I started to hulk out because it felt like everybody was treating me like a crazy person when they couldn’t understand that by merely swapping places in the turn order you essentially screw over every other player but whatever. For the rest of the game it was pretty snippy and there was some passive-aggressiveness over who took rubies and whatnot. After the final round we decided to not try tallying up the points since I didn’t seem to explain the rules well enough.

I still had a blast playing Caverna, which I should probably make clear in spite of anything that might have happened. As for Keen’s thoughts on the game, well, you will have to ask him but I think he still liked it. My mom REALLY enjoyed herself, though! She loves playing those tablet games where you farm and make villages (bleh…) and it seemed to translate into her liking Caverna a lot. Hopefully I can scrounge up enough people to play again.

Future Board Games

The next games on my radar are: Marvel Legendary: Villains, The Witcher Adventure Game, and DungeonQuest Revised Edtion.

None of those are out yet but I’m looking forward to all of them. We had fun with the original Legendary game and the new villain versions looks to be a lot of fun. The Witcher looks pretty great as well and I’ve been interested in playing some form of DungeonQuest ever since I got into the hobby. So what have you guys been playing?

  • We just recently started Munchkin. We got the Cthulu one and Star Munchkin. Lots of fun and the games are pretty quick. We also have been playing King of Tokyo which is another quick one. After so many long nights on Arkham Horror our group is happier with the quicker games lately.

  • I think Caverna captures the feel of the old Agricola to some extend but there were a few things that made Agricola special. In Agricola there is a lot of pressure to feed your family and avoid minus points at the end of the game. At times it feels impossible to get it all done. The penalty for failing to feed your family is huge and that makes it an exhausting game to play. Afterwards, you feel like you really build a farm and your head spins. There is a difference between a. not optimizing your gameplay and leaving points on the table and b. getting huge negative points and negative consequences for not achieving certain things. While technically, it shouldn’t really matter, it does though. The other part of Agricola that was a ton of fun was that you received several occupation and minor improvement cars at the beginning of the game and you used those to formulate a specific strategy…that part was just awesome.

    Other games I have played have been Marvel Dicemasters Avengers v. X-Men, some Battlelore 2nd Edition, and we just started playing Kaosball.