Following along the same lines as its predecessor Agricola, Caverna: The Cave Farmers is a worker-placement board game at heart, designed by Uwe Rosenberg, with a focus on farming. In the game, you are the bearded leader of a small dwarf family that lives in a little cave in the mountains. You begin the game with a farmer and his spouse, and each member of the farming family represents an action that the player can take each turn. Together, you cultivate the forest in front of your cave and dig deeper into the mountain. You furnish the caves as dwellings for your offspring as well as working spaces for small enterprises. It's up to you how much ore you want to mine. You will need it to forge weapons that allow you to go on expeditions to gain bonus items and actions. While digging through the mountain, you may come across water sources and find ore and ruby mines that help you increase your wealth. Right in front of your cave, you can increase your wealth even further with agriculture: You can cut down the forest to sow fields and fence in pastures to hold your animals. You can also expand your family while running your ever-growing farm. In the end, the player with the most efficiently developed home board wins. Board game contents: 20 light brown dog tokens (timber) 35 white sheep tokens (timber) 30 grey donkey tokens (timber) 30 black wild boar tokens (timber) 30 brown cattle tokens (timber) 45 brown wood tokens 25 grey stone tokens (timber) 45 black Ore gems (acrylic) 20 red Ruby gems (acrylic) 40 yellow grain tokens 35 orange vegetable tokens 1 yellow starting player token 7 x3 stables 7 x5 Dwarf discs 16 Game Boards (various types) 49 Gold coins (cardboard), made up of 1, 2 and 10 denominations. 1 dwarf marker (cardboard) 88 food markers (cardboard) 7 round harvest markers (cardboard) 52 weapon strength markers (cardboard) 8 multiplication markers (cardboard) 8 goods markers (cardboard) 208 furnishing and landscape tiles 29 playing cards scoring pad rule book and appendix Our Review and Recommendation: Uwe Rosenberg has designed an outstanding board game. This is our favourite of his farming series that we have played. We've enjoyed this game at 2 players but unfortunately have not yet played it at higher player counts. Game components are top notch, and timber pieces are cute with little timber animals and vegetable tokens a pleasure to use. We strongly recommend this game and rate it a strong 8.5 out of 10. Once we have played it at a higher player count I'll update this review. If you like the farming aspect, and enjoy a little bit of adventure and building in an underground cave then this game is for you. Upgrades for Caverna: We haven't yet done any upgrades for Caverna, but it is a game I can see us eventually creating some little pieces for (Items I'd like to design upgrades for this game would likely be the first player token, potentially food markers, dwarfs and stables). If you are super keen on these let us know, as I may increase the priority to create them.
