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While the Stardew Valley video game has a reputation as a chill activity, the board game is quite demanding. And the first time you play, you might be in for a surprise. Over time you can fish in various locations, buy buildings and animals for your farm, explore the mine and give items to the museum.įor the most part, actions allow you to obtain or exchange resources that you can use to pursue the game’s goals. Location actions include things like buying seeds at Pierre’s General Store in town, planting them and then moving to the fields to water and possibly harvest them. There’s a lot of variety here, including additional sub-event decks for more detail and it really helps keep players on their toes and engage with what would otherwise be a dull phase of book-keeping.Īctual play involves you choosing a location on the board and either taking two relevant actions there or taking one then moving to an adjacent location to take a second action there and scavenging along the route. Your play group will need to work together to reveal and achieve them all in order to win.Īt the start of each turn, there’s a season card that either shows a festival or a chain of pre-turn effects that can run from rain watering your fields to having the wicked Joja Corp slap charges onto board locations. These are resource-based, requiring quantities of things like gold, fish or minerals and start face-down. The other deck determines what’s needed to repair rooms in the community center.
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One is Grandpa’s Goals, which give varied, high-level targets like each player ending the game with three friends, or exploring down to the bottom of the mine. At the start of the game, you’ll deal out a selection of objectives from two decks. Given that the video game offers a smooth, tutorial-based introduction, you might be surprised to find that Stardew Valley: The Board Game is moderately complex. The whole assemblage looks great set up on the table, even without the benefit of miniatures. It gives the game a strong sense of identity, at once evoking the video game version while still clearly being its own thing. The game uses standard gaming pawns rather than miniatures or standees and the dice are custom printed.Įverything is illustrated in a fun cartoon style that’s very reminiscent of the source game without veering into pixel art.
#STARDEW VALLEY COOP PLUS#
The fold-out board showing a map of Stardew Valley as well as lots of bookkeeping spaces, plus some decks of cards, dice and pawns round out the contents. There are so many tiles that the game even includes a special tray to sort and store those that don’t belong in the supplied draw bags. Tiles for fish, tiles for minerals, tiles for crops, tiles for scavenging and even tiles for ancient artefacts. Underneath that is sheet after sheet of punch-out cardboard tiles. What’s in the BoxĪt the top of the box is the rulebook with a nice welcome letter on the cover, reminiscent of the opening of the video game. But at the same time, it’s hard to imagine there’s anyone better to capture the spirit of the original, at least. So it’s a brave step for a video game developer to try their hand at board game design for the first time. Cramming the sheer variety of a video game into a cardboard box is no easy task, let alone trying to replicate the chill feel of farming in the valley.