How Bloat Hurts Caverna (featuring Agricola)

Description provided by Shelfside on YouTube:

While undergoing his challenge to play Agricola every single day for as long as possible (currently at Day 19 at the time of this video's posting), Ashton takes a closer look at Uwe Rosenberg's other game, Caverna and why it might be held back by some of its bloat. Caverna: the Cave Farmers (published by Lookout Games) is a farm themed Euro worker placement game for 1-7 players where players assume the role of dwarves. Players will collect livestock, place tiles that represent farmland and caves, and take the automatically growing resources needed to expand. Released in 2013 and also known as a bigger, more fantasy-themed version of Agricola, Caverna has won plenty of awards and has been on the Board Game Geek top 10 list a couple of years ago. Agricola has blown Ashton away, as he started slow and steady on the site http://boiteajeux.net/ and loved the occupations, minor improvements, and how tense the game felt. It also helped that playing online went extremely quickly without any setup, and points were all automated. Agricola was awesome online (with an actual ELO system), but Caverna cannot be found in any website to play! And so Ashton had to delve deeper on why Caverna doesn't get the same love. Playing Agricola after having owned Caverna for 6 years really shed some light on how Ashton perceived both of these games, so he had to make a video on his thoughts. After being inspired by Root's designer Cole Wehrle on his post on BGG about Caverna, Ashton wanted to look into why the bloat in the form of buildings hurts the Caverna experience, namely for competitive reasons. Because its not very competitive, the game lends itself into being a sandbox experience, or social group puzzle, and then doesn't get played again. Link to Cole Wehrle's thoughts: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1086471/embarrassment-riches-searching-fight-caverna Support us: https://www.patreon.com/shelfside https://ko-fi.com/shelfside Our Website! https://www.shelfside.co Purchase Games We’ve Reviewed! (Paid Link) https://amazon.com/shop/shelfside Links to our stuff: Ashton's Channel: https://www.youtube.com/ashtonwu Daniel's Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/doyduh2 Shelfside Social Media: https://twitter.com/ShelfSideYT https://www.instagram.com/shelfsideboardgames/ https://www.facebook.com/ShelfsideYT/ #boardgames #euro #tabletop