Stardew Valley.

My daughter loves the video game Stardew Valley, even though, according to her, there’s no actual end or final goal; you just keep playing to accomplish tasks and get more gold or other rewards, without a destination. I find that idea maddening. Whether a game is competitive or cooperative, there has to be a way to win. Otherwise, it’s not a game – it’s work.

The tabletop version of Stardew Valley does have a way to win, although it’s pretty hard to pull off. It’s a cooperative game for up to 4 players, with a solo mode, where you play through four seasons, planting and harvesting crops, rearing animals, fishing, exploring the mine, and making friends with villagers, all to try to achieve four objective cards and renovate the six rooms in the community center by making the appropriate donations. You get 16 turns apiece, and just two brief actions per turn, so you have to be ruthlessly efficient, contrary to the laid-back approach of the video game version. If you achieve all ten goals before you reach the end of winter, you win; otherwise, you lose.

Each season has four cards within it, telling you what to do on the board before players take their turns, and then a cleanup card at the end of the season that reminds you to change out that season’s forage tokens for the next one’s and to choose an additional professional skill card for their chosen profession (farmer, fisherman, forager, miner). At the start of the players’ turn, they may sell goods from their inventory for gold or swap them with each other, and then each player places their pawn on any location on the board, either taking two actions at that spot, or taking one action and moving to an adjacent location to take a second action. The benefit of the latter choice is that the player may take a face-down foraging token from the board, which gives some reward – basic goods like stone or wood, foraged plants that can be gifted or sold, or fancier items like artifacts or minerals that can be sold or donated to the museum for hearts.

The main ways to gain resources and money are growing crops, animal husbandry, mining, and fishing. Planting crops requires buying seeds at the town center, watering them (or praying for rain), and then harvesting them automatically when they have been watered enough times to match the water symbol on the tile. Rearing animals requires building a barn or coop first, and then moving to the farm to collect eggs, milk, wool, or feathers. Any player can fish by going to the river, lake, or ocean, then rolling three dice and assigning them to any of the five fishing tokens in the display, taking the fish that the dice match. The mine has 12 levels, and each has its own map and monster; you roll two dice and gain the reward (or penalty) shown at the intersection of their two values on the map card’s 3×3 grid, which can include the power to move down another level. Lower levels have better rewards, and one of the potential end-game objectives is to reach level 12.

You also need goods to gift to villagers you befriend, another action you take in the town. You draw the top card from the villager deck and give them any gift, as long as it’s not identified on the right side of the card as something they hate. If it’s an item they love, you get two hearts; if not, you get one. If you give them a gift in their birthday season, you get an extra heart. Hearts have many functions in Stardew Valley, but the most important one is to reveal the required donations for the community center’s six rooms.

Each player starts the game with one of the four professions and a basic tool which can be upgraded multiple times with copper ore. After each season, every player takes two Profession Upgrade cards and chooses one to keep, replacing one of the two they already have if necessary. These make your actions more powerful and/or allow you to re-roll or redo some unfavorable actions, commensurate with leveling up in a role-playing game.

There are way too many components in Stardew Valley, and it could have been a much simpler box if they weren’t trying so hard to replicate the video game. It’s cute that there are new crops for each season (except winter), but that’s hardly necessary, nor are all of the types of ore and geodes. You can upgrade crops and animal products to “quality” versions, which are worth all of 1 extra gold coin when you sell them, hardly worth the effort. There are twelve card decks, and that’s counting the four profession upgrade card decks as one. There are two bags of tiles, one of a billion kinds of fish (and trash), one of artifacts and minerals. I count 286 separate tiles, plus the various gold and heart tokens. It’s design overkill, and nearly all of these could have been condensed or simplified.

The fact that the bundles are hidden at the start of the game is just a nuisance, as some of them have to be completed before autumn or the pieces you need will no longer be available – there’s a way to swap them out, but that’s an extra step for no good reason, and the rulebook doesn’t actually tell you that these requirements are time-sensitive. The game is hard enough to complete as it is, but if you don’t reveal those cards early – and you wouldn’t know this unless you read the separate strategy tips insert or read some online suggetsions – you can end up unable to complete the game. There’s also some forced resource scarcity here that isn’t easy to overcome, particularly stone, which you need to go down further in the mine, and there’s no way to buy or trade for it.

The game’s box suggests it will take 45 minutes per player, which was true for us, and I imagine would make the game unbearable for four players (that’s three hours, if you don’t want to do the math). It does feel like a game that will go faster the more you play it, once you have some sense of what actions are more useful given the goals for the game and your chosen profession(s). I do like Stardew Valley for what it is, although if they’d streamlined all the components and some of the rules – maybe making one fishing site, cutting down some of the event cards and item types, and using far fewer goods – I might have loved it.