Starling Games | Everdell: Spirecrest 2nd Edition Expansion | Board Game | Ages 10+ | 1-4 Players | 40-100 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

Rather than a diverse world and city-building exercise, Pearlbrook feels like a race to build the Wonders. To me, this is not a substantial increase when compared to the retail equivalent that comes with 33 Discovery cards and five Big Critters. The resources allow you to pay the cost of playing the respective construction or critter card into your city (a space on the table) up to a maximum of 15 cards. There are various kinds of discovery cards — they largely mirror the types of cards in the base game — but the most notable type are the “Big Critters. Spirecrest also includes 4 new sets of workers for players to use as their game faction: badgers, foxes, lizards, and owls.

Mostly, though, the cards only widen the eclipse by pulling players to the River and away from the base game. Every time a player moves to the next season, they are able to select one of the available Map Tiles on the current trail. I also say “hardly” an expansion because three cards that are worth a collective two points with a stack of rat meeples hardly amount to radical transformation. The Weather Cards might be needed to temper the points because of all of the extra actions and powers that players are going to be gaining from the Discovery Cards, but I think they just annoy me more than anything.The Mountain Board controls the main actions of the expansion, and it is activated — with players travelling along it — at each new season. While I don’t dislike the water world, I have to be in a different mood to play Pearlbrook because it is so very unique. As is the case with the solo mode in the base game, playing Spirecrest solitaire requires extremely little upkeep on the part of the human player. The king is throwing an unprecedented year-long event to commemorate the 100th year since Everdell's founding. The artwork is great, even though there isn’t a lot of it, given that Spirecrest doesn’t add any new cards to the base deck.

Or even worse, wildfires that ravages the autumn forest and requires you to place one of your workers on the weather card in question for the remainder of the game. But on the other hand, every time a new player comes to the table, the length of the game jumps inordinately. On paper though, when compared to its forbearer it seemed that Spirecrest was indeed a much more evolved addition to the core game experience. Regardless of the merits, I knew from the start that Bellfaire would have to appeal to me somewhere other than the player count. It introduces cards that make your actions a little more difficult and then a second set of cards that give you extra benefits.Weather affects general rules of the game — for example, a blizzard means you take a resource fewer at forest spaces, or a drought means production cards do not activate when played — so this can alter the strategy. Author’s Note: I’m breaking with our traditional review format today, so this will be a review that integrates the gameplay description with my thoughts on the expansion. Pearlbrook was the first box expansion to see the light of retail day after the base game and Collector’s Edition. On the plus side, the Pirate Ship is a beautifully thematic card which—like Rugwort—lends a bit of a take-that mechanism.