Welcome to Everdell Team Reveals How They Created an Everdell for All Ages
The team behind Welcome to Everdell talks making a game for all fans, future of the franchise, and more.
Everdell's charming cast of characters and stellar gameplay has made it one of tabletop's brightest gems, and thankfully the franchise shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. Now Tabletop Tycoon has expanded the franchise once more with Welcome to Everdell, and as the name suggests, this entry is the perfect way to introduce new fans to the franchise. That said, Welcome to Everdell's all-ages approach to the series will also appeal to longtime fans as well, as it streamlines the beloved game into a more compact and less time consuming experience. ComicBook had the chance to speak to Tabletop Tycoon Founder Dan Yarrington and Welcome to Everdell Co-Designer James Wilson all about the game and what new fans and longtime fans will love once they jump in and give the game a try.
A Perfect Starting Point
Welcome to Everdell is designed as a one-stop-shop for those looking to jump into the Everdell world, and takes both scale and price into consideration. The other major element it considers is new fans who can grow with the game, so a younger player can make the experience more complex as they get older. "It's standalone. You don't have to worry about a bunch of expansions and stuff, very much like what you'll see at Monopoly or Jenga or something like that. There could be other versions of it, but it's not like, Hey, here's the 27 expansions, the Jenga that you have to learn and add on," Yarrington said.
"So the simplicity of it in a lot of ways is what makes that great, and then as the kids age, my kids were, my youngest was four, he's now eight. When we started working on this project, he was four. So now he's grown to the point where, okay, now you can play real, right? So now we can still play Welcome to Everdell, and we can just enjoy that, and that's any age. Like I said, there are people that are in their fifties and they're like, I like Welcome to Everdell more than Everdell," Yarrington said.
"It's also a lower price point so people can get into it. Everdell the regular game, standard edition, $75. So this is a third of that cost to be able to get that core Everdell experience as a full fledged complete game. It's not dumbed down, it's not stripped or anything like that. There's a lot of really cool stuff in there," Yarrington said.
Not Just a Kids Game
Welcome to Everdell was inspired by Wilson's kids, as one day the couple noticed they were playing with all of the pieces from the core Everdell game and having a wonderful time without actually playing the game. "They were happy and they just would do that for a long time. And my wife, who co-designed Welcome to Everdell with me and I were talking like, that's almost enough of a game for the younger kids to do that, and so we just started brainstorming, what if there was a way to play Everdell that still felt like Everdell, but that our really young kids could grasp as well and that we could enjoy," Wilson said. "The pieces were there and our kids were showing us what they wanted to do. We just let them guide us on how much they needed it to be or wanted it to be."
"We on purpose didn't want this to be a kids' game. We wanted this to be a game you can play with your kids. And that's a pretty big difference actually, because a lot of times the kids' game, the adults don't really get involved. They're not engaged," Wilson said. "And so we were so glad to get it to what we feel. It's at that spot where just like you've both been saying, and Dan in particular in the office, there's 50-year-old adults that say, I enjoy this game. And then there's kids that say, I love this game, I want to play it back to back. And that's what we wanted it to be, that it wasn't only for kids or something like that."
What The Future Holds
Welcome to Everdell is a wonderful entryway into the Everdell universe, and Yarrington teased that the franchise has all sorts of plans moving into the future, so those who jump in will have plenty to look forward to. "This is the first time that we've had something this accessible and this broadly available through Walmart now through this launch that people can get it at that low a price point and jump into the game," Yarrington said. "And so we're hoping that it expands beyond the tons of people who have already played Everdell as a line. And yes, we do have plans for, like I said, we're in year six, we just had the five year anniversary last year, so we've got to plan out to at least year 10 and we'll keep going as long as people want to keep buying stuff. That's the plan."
Welcome to Everdell is designed as a complete experience for a wide age range, and part of what makes it so great is the fact that it's so self-contained. That said, that doesn't mean there aren't ways to bring some of the expansion content into that corner of the world. "Now, does it mean that there could never be a Far Shore themed welcome to Everdell? No, of course not. That's possible. But welcome to Everdelll is designed as like, Hey, I come in, I play this game," Yarrington said.
"I am so excited that it's able to be widely accessible and we hope that people at Walmart will pick it up not knowing what it is, and be really surprised to discover a little bit deeper level of game than they thought was out there and something that everybody, literally, everybody at the table can go, this is really engaging," Wilson said. "I'm having a really fun time with this and this world is exciting, and if that's where they stay and they never go beyond it, that's still great that we were able to give that. But if it wets their appetite for something a little more and they go towards something like Everdell later, then that's exciting for them because the world has really opened up because it's a huge world as we know who's in the industry. There's so many great games to explore out there, but there are a lot of people still who haven't found that and discovered that game that gets them in there. So if Welcome to Everdell can be that, I mean that would be really cool."
Welcome to Everdell is available at Walmart, and you can order the game right here.
Have you tried Welcome to Everdell yet? You can talk all things gaming with me on Threads and Twitter @mattaguilarcb!
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