Oh, Caverna. You odd little duckling, you. I remember the first time I assembled your main board, thinking “Golly gee willickers, that’s a lot of worker locations!” In that playthrough I had mused “Such a variety of ways to win!” And at the end, I exclaimed “Uwe has outdone himself now!”
Pffft, WRONG. Three years later A Feast for Odin came out and that b*tch made Caverna look like a print-and-play Walker-Harding design. The d*mn Greek God’s dinner table has seventy worker-placement spots. SEVENTY! Do you have any idea what could POSSIBLY make a designer create a game with that many options?!
Cause it’s cocaine. Gotta be it. Thousand dollar German blow sliced into lines of cows and piggies is what I’m saying. But I digress.
Caverna, in my eyes, is the finest achievement of that coke-fiend Rosenberg. The combination of an original theme, unique usages of resources, and an unlimited puppy mechanic is why it surpasses other relatively simple worker-placement games. I say relatively cause there ain’t nothing simple about planning a long term strategy in this game. It takes several rounds just to get an engine going and then BAM some poacher takes the overflowing sheep spot! And hoo-BOY is the sowing fields mechanic mighty hard to put into words. But it is a simple “get resources and spend them for points” kinda game, and unlike others, Caverna works at a variety of player counts. Except solo. Don’t do that. Solo Caverna is as enjoyable as a donkey kick to your southern veggies. The challenge of Caverna isn’t so much “what” to do, but “how” fast can you do it. Cause there’s a lot of sh*t you gotta do before the game ends.
Gameplay
Caverna is a worker-placement, resource-management point salad. You play as a family of dwarves expanding your fields and cave with a variety of tiles. Some worker locations give you resources (which increase in the amount given over time) while other locations allow you to place tiles onto your player board. These tiles, thematically, fill your fields with crops and livestock while your cave grows into a pretty sweet eighteenth century Victorian manor with a master bedroom for your bovine harem (You’d have to play to understand). You can gain more workers by growing your family, turn workers into adventurers (Increasing their usefulness in certain spots), and you will gain points from everything – rooms, livestock, fenced fields, and some rooms allow you to score points in unique ways. It’s one of the most thematic Euro games out there.
1ST CLAW - Arm the Children
“Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys” was never once uttered by a dwarf in this game. The first two things you will do in Caverna is gather desired resources and then turn yourself, your spouse, and any offspring you pop out into fierce adventures. Adventuring allows you to pick and choose your reward during a placement – a concept only DREAMT about in other worker games. Your adventures can bring home dogs, pigs, wheat, four acres of fencing, and literally an entire f*ck*ng sheep cuddling room (Might need one of those in a pinch). The game only starts with one of these special adventuring locations and so the 1st player jostling becomes a mini-game in the beginning. The first claw of Caverna is a mix of gathering small amounts of resources while trying like hell to enlist your struggling family into high-level homicidal barbarian training.
2ND CLAW - Build, Build Build!
Each round begins with an additional worker-placement spot opening up. This is similar to Lords of Waterdeep and Flamecraft, but these new locations open up entirely new engines you can mess with. You can begin to breed sheep, mine deep underground, gain more workers, and then suddenly realize (holy sh*t!) a heaping pile of logs has gone ignored so you throw your new-born Billy back to the wood-gathering spot. The effect of new worker spots is not balanced out by more workers showing up – those two concepts are disconnected in Caverna. The side-effect is that resources begin to pile up, which is another reason Caverna is an easier game – Doing what you want isn’t constantly blockaded as commonly as in Dune: Imperium or Dwellings of Eldervale. The 2nd claw strikes when you can finally build your mansion and grow your crops with some G*d d*mn peace and quiet!
THE BITE - Mind the Yellow Rooms
Near the end of Caverna, every player’s board looks like a diverse ecosystem of Dwarven life. A passerbier of your table might look at the game and say “Boy, you guys all look like you’re doing well.” And that passerbier is, in fact, a f*ck*ng idiot. Because he has no IDEA how the yellow rooms are f*ck*ng with the math. In addition to filling up your board with rooms, fields, animals and two hundred f*ck*ng wild puppers, you’ve also been eying up the yellow rooms. These special rooms allow for players to score points in unique ways, and anyone who has played a point salad knows near the end of the game you hammer the f*ck out of these individual systems. Just about anything can give you extra points if you built the room – wood, sheep, infants armed to the teeth. Though exploiting the same action over and over again can trun some games into borefests (Like eggs in Wingspan), this only really comes in at Caverna’s end and is anything but a foregone conclusion as those *ssh*le enemies of yours got their own reasons for taking the spots.