New Everdell board game Farshore sets sail for oddly familiar horizons

A new upcoming board game from the makers of Everdell explores a new region in the series’ woodland critter world but sounds like it leaves the core experience largely untouched.

Everdell Farshore will dock at retail shelves in Autumn of this year, delivering a worker-placement and tableau-building board game that will seemingly feel very familiar to Everdell veterans. While the new title is standalone and not an expansion on the base Everdell experience, players will still be managing resources, collecting a range of anthropomorphic animal workers and labouring through the changing seasons to hit their goals.

James and Clarissa Wilson, creators of Everdell who also had a hand in that board game’s many offshoots and expansions, will be handling design, which might attribute to the shared DNA between it and this newest Farshore box. Players will encounter four new species of animals - crabs, beavers, ducks and puffins - and sail into the open waters beyond the North Shore in search of maps that will guide them to treasure and riches.

How this new system fits into the mechanical core borrowed from Everdell isn’t yet clear - the little information we know at the moment is pulled from a pre-order page on publisher Starling Games’ website. The board is immediately reminiscent of the forest from the original, though the big cut-out tree has been swapped for a lighthouse. Promotional copy mentions “adapting to the winds of change” and a scriptorium where monks pore over meticulous recreation of scrolls, but not much more is known at the moment.

Farshore will support one to four players in sessions that last anywhere from 40 to 80 minutes. That does mean the board game will support solo play, with rules designed by Chrissy and Tom Peske, and will come with all the extra components necessary to play this board game on your own. Illustrator Jacqui Davis has returned to once again ply her signature style to another corner of Everdell’s world.

Everdell Farshore is currently accepting pre-orders on Starling Game’s website for $75 per box and says that batch should begin shipping on August 31st. There is currently no word on when to expect Farshore to show up in retail, nor what the off-the-shelf cost will be.