Stardew Valley The Board Game is a 2021 game designed by Cole Medeiros and Eric Barone, and published by ConcernedApe
Stardew Valley: The Board Game supports 1-4 players cooperatively working to restore their Grandfather’s farm and find their place in the idyllic seaside village of Pelican Town. Join us. Thrive.
Is it fun?
Yes. Mostly. With some caveats.
The first caveat is randomness. It can kill your whole game.
This is yet another co-op game that could fall victim to That One Player who has charted out an Optimal Strategy and has figured out your turn for you. There’s a good chance you know someone like this, and if you don’t, I have bad news. Either way, I appreciate that the game has a “discussion time” built in to alleviate some of this mechanically.
I’m going fishing this turn, Janet, and I don’t care if you think I should be mining.
The fun is found in the same things that make Stardew fun: discovery, collection, upgrades, and the random happenstances of day-to-day turns. It’s CHARMING and it feels good to be successful in the game.
But I have to dock it a little, because the most fun I have with it involves a very custom set of house rules to streamline it and open some opportunities. I don’t love buying a game and then immediately feeling like I need to adjust the rules to enjoy it.
It is long (suggesting 40 minutes per player, plus a large setup), and, as I will discuss later, driven heavily by chance. That said, it shines in the planning phase, where everyone tries to figure out what two actions they will take to move the team towards victory. Giving everyone a specialization gives them an area they can focus on and feel distinct in, while still being worth occasionally helping out with a task outside that profession.
For a co-op game to really excel it needs to feel challenging yet achievable, and the outcome should feel uncertain right up to the end. While my margin of victory or defeat in this game has been narrow, I usually feel like I know when I’m going to lose simply due to how random this game really is. Fun, yes, but with some qualifiers.
Do the components/aesthetics improve the experience?
This game does pass the vibe check. They don’t detract from the experience, that’s for sure. I do think the components do their jobs and don’t get in the way. That’s just about the best that I can say for any board game. The art matches the game perfectly and draws you into the world of Stardew.
The art is faithfully charming to the source material, but I found a number of cardboard tokens frayed when punching them out the first time I opened this game. Great art, somewhat questionable component quality.
Does playing the game create an immersive experience?
When I’m playing Stardew Valley the video game, I get the sense that there is never enough time to do all the stuff I want to do. When I play Stardew Valley the board game, strangely enough, that feeling persists. I wish the crop mechanic were different somehow. I don’t necessarily need more dice to roll but it more than anything else felt the least thematic, the most out of place.
The scope of the Stardew Valley video game is so large, and the stakes so low (there’s no game over, or losing), that adapting it to a board game is no simple task. Uncharacteristically, I am inclined to be generous in this category, as it does hit the key notes. You farm, fish, forage, and…fadventure in the fmines (got there) to gather resources that you either feed back into that engine to improve your output, or give to the townsfolk to make friends, all in the hope of meeting your ghostly grandfather’s posthumous expectations and restore the town’s defunct community center.
How often does a player make meaningful choices?
This is a game where players may feel at risk of turning into an NPC. Every turn on the farm matters, but any individual person may not matter. The community as a whole thrives.
Unless the dice are against you, and then it doesn’t.
I’ve read horror stories of people losing their first playthroughs, and with Rules As Written, this is a very real possibility. The randomness here means that one game could be easy and another game is impossible.
Ugh. Both every turn, and almost never. As I mentioned above, the planning phase is good; mapping out your strategy with the other players is excellent–each person feels like they can contribute meaningfully, and there is no shortage of objectives (10 in total) so there is always a drive to try and be efficient and effective every turn. And then, in almost every case, you roll some dice (or draw a card) and there go your carefully laid plans. I agree that success should not be guaranteed, but everywhere you turn in this game there is an element of chance that basically boils down to pass or fail. An entire turn can be lost to bad luck, and not even extraordinarily bad luck, just mildly poor luck, and that feels real bad.
Does the level of player interaction encourage continual engagement?
The player interaction here only goes so far as your social dynamic. You could be a rebel and tell Janet that you’re going fishing this turn, even if she really thinks somebody needs to go into town and buy crops. Make her do it. There’s some item sharing and collective resource pooling, although at times it felt like the strict timing on that felt a little forced, maybe clumsy.
Absolutely. Even though each player takes an independent turn, in order, they are quick enough that players don’t usually get distracted during other players’ turns. This is encouraged by the planning phase, where players get to plan out their turns together, so everyone can feel involved and integral to succeeding. While co-op games can often fall victim to ‘alpha gaming’ (i.e. one player just tells everyone else where to go and what to do), this game feels like it mitigates that (though does not completely solve it), I think because of the very distinct roles each player can fill.
Is the game balanced such that it feels like a fair experience?
Solo play may not be as balanced as multiplayer play. The “balance” of the game is just “multiply the number of required turn-ins by number of players” but I get the sense that the action economy of multiple players more than makes up for the difference on a long enough timeline.
But I’ve also been playing this game with children, and I’ve found that it benefits strongly from house rules. Like always include a festival in your seasons when you’re building the deck. Start the game with a bundle revealed. There are great ways to adjust the difficulty.
I get that in a co-op game you have to feel like you can lose, but look: this isn’t Battlestar Galactica. You don’t want to lose at farming. And you really don’t want farming to feel like the cylons are coming.
Not at all; this is definitely the biggest issue with this game. First, as mentioned above, all too easily a die roll can mean that someone’s turn is completely wasted. Since everyone is working together to try and meet those 10 objectives, that alone can throw off the team’s whole rhythm. Add to that what feels like an incredibly steep cost to reveal the 6 hidden objectives, and the fact that some objectives can only be completed in certain seasons, and you can find yourself very easily screwed out of any hope of winning. For example: let’s say you finally scrape together enough hearts to reveal the craft room objective (1 heart per player–no easy feat given that you have no real control over gaining hearts) at the beginning of summer, only to find that the objective is Spring Forageables, which is now impossible to complete. For the same cost of revealing it you can replace it, but it’s a huge setback and what you get will be random, so you can’t plan for it while you build up the hearts to make the swap. The first thing I would change about this game, which is admittedly an easy house rule to implement, is to have the Community Center bundles revealed at the start of the game. Yes, doing so makes the game a little easier, but it avoids the game being nigh-impossible if you get unlucky.
How often would you want to play this game?
Oof. It’s a great game and I love it but this game is a T I M E I N V E S T M E N T. The designers themselves proclaim that this takes 45 minutes per player, and they’re not kidding. I almost always want to play something else. The only time I’ll agree to bring this out anymore is with begging, and possibly with a forced time constraint.
Sadly, not often. The long play time and the frustrating randomness mean I would only consent to play this once in a while, and probably only with some house-rules enforced. That said, not never. The last time I played this we threw on the Stardew Valley (video game) soundtrack in the background, and it was a pleasant time–fun, even, when our plans came together.
Is the game accessible?
I have to give it good marks here: Reading required, dice rolling common. If you embrace just how gosh darned customizable the rules can be in this game, I think you have no problem playing it with varying skill and ability levels.
I am going to again be somewhat generous here, and say yes. There are, admittedly, a lot of components and individual mechanics, but none of them are that difficult to learn or teach. The individual professions help out again here, by giving a player something they can focus on, so they can start playing without being as familiar with all the other mechanics, and just pick those up as they see the other players do them.
Is the game good value?
Slightly, with consideration of a few factors. The price is on par with other big-box productions, and you get a lot of gameplay out of it. The production value is high, and the game is reasonably replayable. Despite all that, it still feels really niche. Unless you’re a Stardew fan or a hardcore board game afficionado, it may not be worth your time.
Given how rarely I expect to get this to the table, value is a little iffy. If you like the video game, and/or you like co-op games, you can definitely do worse than this title, but I’d try it before you buy it if you can manage it.
Je ne sais quoi?
Look — I love Stardew Valley, and the immersion here is top notch. Despite the randomness and the rules-as-written difficulty, I like the game and the setting enough to adjust the experience and turn it into something really enjoyable. I’m the target market. Despite the frustration I’ve had playing this game, I still keep thinking maybe I should pull it out and play it again. If that’s not an endorsement, I dunno what is.
The Stardew Valley video game currently stands as one of my all-time favorites. Adapting it to a board game, especially given its scope and low-stakes nature, was surely a challenge. Much of the original game’s charm is still here, aesthetically, certainly, but also in the strive for efficient and effective time (or in this case: turn) management. While the game falters in a number of balance and gameplay facets, overall it still evokes the source material for me, and that is a huge plus. If you’re a fan of the video game or think it sounds interesting, this game is worth a try. If you bounce off it, reflect on the elements you did not enjoy–odds are good there are some easy house rules you can implement to address those.
Final Thoughts
If you like board games and you are a fan of the Stardew Valley video game, you will probably enjoy this game. That said, play it once with rules-as-written, then choose the house-rules you will use going forward. This game is aggressively difficult without them, and you will find it a much more pleasant experience if you tune the difficulty to your taste. To its credit, there are a number of ways to accomplish this very easily–start with bundles revealed, add more festivals to the seasons deck, et cetera.
Final Scores