Last night, we played my brother-in-law’s new copy of Stardew Valley: the Board Game. Because I am the “gamer” in the family, I was the one who learned the game and punched out the components. The cardboard tiles are pretty good quality (though not all of them were fully punched through), but the card stock is kind of crap. I am not at all familiar with the video game, so I have no idea how well the game represents it, but from most reviews I have seen, many people think it does a good job of it.
We ended up playing the short variant, since it was our first time playing, so there was the Teach to deal with, plus a number of stops to look up details on the various actions. It’s not overly complex, but there’s enough wiggly bits that a few look ups the first time were inevitable. It helps that it is co-op, so everything is out in the open.
The game is pretty cute, but definitely hard because there are a lot of objectives to accomplish in limited time, and depending on the objective, you may be at the mercy of dice to complete it. You need hearts to reveal the community center objectives (1 per player, per objective, 6 in full game, 3 in short game), which you mostly get from befriending villagers. However, when you draw from the villager deck, you do not know ahead of time what they like or hate, so it is possible you will not have a resource to give them that will get you hearts, meaning your action was wasted. Fishing is dice based, and it is possible a bad roll prevents you from getting anything off of the fish track. Same with mining, which involves rolling two dice and comparing on a grid, which changes as you descend in the mine.
If you move between two locations, you can forage, letting you take a face down tile from either side of the path, which can get you stuff to sell or use for befriending villagers, or minerals or artifacts which can be donated to the museum, which can be one of the objectives to win the game. These can also be gained from geodes which can be obtained in the mine, then opened by another location where you roll one die to see what is contained inside it, which will be ore, a mineral, or an artifact. So, more randomness.
Despite all the randomness, I did enjoy what we played. It was pretty clear by the beginning of Winter that we were not going to win, but it is a relaxing game. I like that there is time to sell goods and trade things between players at the beginning of each turn, which lets you strategize during each planning phase as to who should do what each turn.
The game length is a bit of a concern, as it took us about two hours to play. The short variant. To be fair, I am assuming this will drop with familiarity, as my understanding is the full game should take about that amount of time.
