Caverna: The Cave Farmers - Tips & Strategies

Caverna can have a lot of overwhelming components, so here’s a few helpful items:
1) The game’s a beast to set up, a Plano organizer for the smaller items and 1 for the room tiles will work for both game play and storage. Otherwise a series of bowls or sorting trays, maybe on a lazy susan for easy access for all players.
2) Read the manual and try a solo game before teaching it to others, or do a 2 player game. 2 player has fewer rounds and fewer components.
3) While its always good first time out to focus on a single simple strategy, especially in a game with so many options – no matter what path you take always consider food. Place tiles to cover squares that offer quick food tokens, acquire at least 2 farm animals that will breed, or sow some seeds – cause you’ll need to feed your workers.
4) Don’t forget that resources can be traded for food.
5) Don’t worry about acquiring more workers your first game, just focus on a single path, and just enough food for your workers. Spending actions and room space for new workers takes away from other options and creates a need for more food.

Choose a totally different strategy from other players to avoid competing with them. For example, if all players but one compete for a crop-growing strategy, the one player who doesn’t will often have the run of the board for all the actions not related to crops and fields.

This game has LOADS of components. To leave it all in the box as it comes will make the setup take quite a while.
So I bought a fish lure box to stash all the animals and all the other resources. Take the lid of the box, stack all the tiles and you’re good to go.

If you own Caverna, I highly recommend buying the Caverna game organizer from The Broken Token. Their organizer kit allows you to easily organize all of your tokens, tiles, cards and game boards in the original game box. It features three removable trays to make game setup and tear-down a breeze. Gameboards lock everything in place during transportation. Caverna ships with a lot of baggies but you won’t need a single one with this box insert! It’s almost cooler than the game itself, though it costs about $35. Totally worth it if you like to play Caverna.