Starling Games, a new design imprint created by Game Salute, will be releasing Everdell,  a worker placement city building game,in Q4.

Everdell is set in a world full of cute anthropomorphic characters who are expanding their peaceful community by establishing new cities.  Each player is responsible for their own city, and after one year, the city worth the most points wins the game.  The cities are built by creating a tableau of Construction and Critter cards, which in turn provide resources and abilities, as well as points at the end of the game.

The game is the first published design by James A. Wilson and features artwork by Andrew Bosley (whose credits include work on Mission:  Red Planet (Second Edition), Blood Bowl:  Team Manager, and Descent:  Journeys in the Dark).  The game combines worker placement, resource management, and city building mechanics.  Each turn, a player may either deploy a worker to gather resources - berries, twigs, resin, and pebbles - or complete other tasks; or they can play a card into their hand by paying the required resources.  Each city is limited to 15 cards, which can provide additional resources, actions for workers, or other rewards.

Everdell includes 128 Critter and Construction cards, 31 mini cards, 110 resource tokens, 54 other tokens, 24 wooden worker pawns, and a gameboard that includes a 3D tree-shaped card holder tall enough to hold all of the cards when sleeved.  The game is intended for 1 to 4 players, ages 13 and up, and takes about 20 minutes per player.  MSRP is $60.00.

Starling Games is funding production of the game through a Kickstarter campaign, which reached its funding goals in less than six hours and sits at just over $100,000 in pledged support from more than 1500 backers with two weeks remaining.  Backer fulfillment is planned for December, with release into the trade to follow.

Game Salute announced Starling Games last week with two other imprints (see “Game Salute Launches New Imprints”).