Caverna: Building on a masterpiece

Caverna is a worker placement game where you try to carve a home into mountains and forests. You delve deep into the mountainside to build ore and ruby mines and furnish your home while also clearing out the nearby forests to raise animals and grow vegetables. Over the course of 12 rounds, you will see your humble abode grow into a massive operation.

There are some very interesting mechanics at play. Your animal herds get larger through breeding, and planting wheat and vegetables into fields multiply your crop over time. Growing your family is a massive investment, but you benefit from being able to do more things every round. You can even arm your workers and send them out on expeditions. Unlike other worker placement games, more worker placement spots come out as the game progresses, meaning that the first few rounds and more focused and less daunting. There is a degree of engine building as well. You can furnish your home with rooms that give you special abilities, such as discounted building and more efficient food production.

Caverna builds on the shoulders of another board gaming legend from the same designer: Agricola. Designer Uwe Rosenberg took on feedback from the board gaming community for his big hit and built on the solid foundation he had. While Agricola felt tough and restrictive, Caverna took off the brakes and gave players creativity.

Agricola’s scoring meant you had to be a jack-of-all-trades, while Caverna allowed you to specialise your farm and still score well. Nonetheless, Caverna still retains many of the groundbreaking mechanics that made Agricola popular, such as goods accumulating on unused worker spots and the animal husbandry and crop mechanics. Amazingly, Caverna comes with enough components to play with a ridiculous 7(!) players – though I don’t think I’d dare try that just yet.

I think Caverna is an amazing game that allows experienced gamers to test their brains and flex their creativity. Seeing your farm expand is extremely gratifying, and looking down at your farm at the end of the game makes you feel accomplished even if you didn’t win the game. End of game scoring is a breeze, especially with the provided scoring pad. This allows players to try different things from game to game. In some games, I focus on building my mines, sometimes I try to be a prolific rancher, and sometimes I try to do a little bit of everything. I love having the ability to choose my own path and having it be a viable strategy.

There are some issues with the game. While the sandboxy nature of the game allows players to do just about anything, this can lead to analysis paralysis in newer players. This is especially the case with the different rooms that you can build in the game. These room tiles have replaced Agricola’s occupation and improvement cards, but the implementation of this is a marmite one. Unlike Agricola’s random card drawing, Caverna opted to have all 48 different rooms available to all players from the start. While this reduces the randomness of its predecessor, it drowns players in choices from the get-go. This makes an overwhelming game even more so, and also means that there is little variation from game to game. There’s nothing stopping players from sticking to tried-and-tested strategies, whereas Agricola’s randomness made players adapt to different circumstances.

 
The game comes with an alternative side, where you can play with significantly fewer buildings. This makes the game more approachable, but does not solve the lack of variability in the game. The only real variability in the game is in the slight variation in the order that worker placement spots come out in, and in the choices that players make.

At the end of the day, Caverna is an excellent farming worker placement game. It takes what made Agricola excellent and changed things up to satisfy the cravings of the gaming community, and the designer should be applauded for being so receptive to feedback. That being said, it is very similar to Agricola, which is an excellent game in its own right. If you are looking for something to test your thinking skills, both are brilliant. If you feel like a tighter, more restrictive game which forces you to think on your feet, consider Agricola. However, if you like the idea of freedom to do whatever you want, Caverna trumps its predecessor. 

For me, however, Caverna takes the cake.