Everdell: Duo is a competitive or cooperative worker placement game for 1-2 players.  It was up on Kickstarter in Aug/Sept. 2024.  It promised delivery in March 2025, but it delivered to me on November 25th, 2024!  Yes, almost 4 months early!

This is a worker placement game in the Everdell universe.  Strictly speaking, I have never played any of the Everdell games, but I was excited about the cooperative mode of this worker placement game!  It plays both solo and cooperatively with 2-Players!  We saw another cooperative worker placement game that went over quite well this year with Endeavour: Deep Sea.  Will Everdell: Duo find that same success?

Unboxing

This is a smaller box: see Coke Can above for perspective. 

I was slightly grumpy at the Kickstarter because they shipped it in a padded envelope, and my box got a little banged up!  See above.  There are some dents, and the top is squished a little, so it feels like I got a Ding-And-Dent day special for this.  So, I was already a little feisty when I opened this. 

And there is really no insert to speak of.  Everything just flops around all willy-nilly in the box!

Luckily, they did include a lot of plastic bags (see above and below) so you organize it.

There’s 4 punchout sheets and the art is pretty groovy on them (see above and below).

Most of the game is on the cards; there’s quite a number of them.

The game looks good: I love that Andrew Bosley art.  See above.

Rulebook 

This rulebook is a mixed bag.

It passes the Chair Test with flying colors! It’s an A! It’s just the right size so that it can fold over perfectly!

See above as the rulebook lays flat and fits perfectly; it’s so easy to read!

The Components list is pretty minimal (lower right of 2nd page, see above), but it works well enough.  The set-up takes up all of page 3, works, pretty well, and is decently notated.  So, things are starting off on a good note.

The Gameplay concentrates on the competitive mode, so the cooperative (and solo) mode take second fiddle a little bit.  For example, the rulebook fully lists/describes the Season card effects for competitive mode, but the cooperative mode Season effects (which are different enough to warrant some text) doesn’t get any explanation.  The game mechanisms are “generally” the same in either competitive or cooperative mode, but of course,  the players have to approach the game differently depending on the mode. 

This also irked me:  they mislabelled the “Card Summary” as an Index! See above!!  An Index is a list of sorted “important” words, with page numbers following in a list: this is NOT an index!  This is a Summary!  Even worse, as a Summary, it’s incomplete!  You MUST print out the special sheet from the website to get all the rules.  I remember looking for the the Inn in the rulebook … it’s not there?

Ah, there it is … at the top of the page!  (NOT an Index).  Do yourself a favor, makes sure you print out a full copy of the (what they call) the Everdell Duo Index!  You need that to play or you will not be very unhappy.

The rulebook taught the game, but I was constantly looking up stuff.  Also, there’s no real picture or great explanation of “town” or tableau.  I think you have to have played enough of these types of games to get that your “town” was the set of cards in front of you.  Again, this could have been clearer.

The rulebook taught the game.  Let’s just leave it at that.  Make sure you print out (what they call) the Everdell Duo Index, or you will be missing some important card descriptions!

Gameplay

This is a worker placement game for 1-2 players.  You can play competitively or cooperatively (the solo mode is just the cooperative mode with one player operating both characters).

There are always two characters in play: the Hare and the Tortoise.  See above as the Hare is on the left hand side, and the Tortoise on the right.

During the game players “usually” do one of two things on their turn; (1) place a worker placement token (see the 3 Tortoise tokens above) or (2) play a card from their hand into their “town” or tableau (see Farmer and Peddler as cards in their hand).

The top and bottom of the board is the worker placement zones. 

The bottom part of the board are spaces that basically give resources (wood, berries, resin, or stone) to a player.  See above. 

At the top of the board (accented by the big tiles) are the big rewards, but they have significant prerequisites.  The Bountiful Harvest (to the left) requires 4 green Production cards, but gives a whopping 5 victory points.

This is generally a victory point game, even in the cooperative mode (but see more discussion below).  For the competitive games, players are competing to get the most victory points.  For the cooperative mode, players (at first at least) need a certain number of victory points as a group to win.

The second most common action is playing cards from your hand (or board) to your “town” or tableau.  It’s not clear from the instructions, but each character has a HAND of cards they can play on the board, and cards they HAVE played into their “town”.  See above as the Harvester, Spelunker, Chip Sweep, and Fairgrounds are in the Hare’s town (with Miller and Barge Toad in hand; they haven’t come out yet).

In order to play a card into your “town” or tableau, the player must pay the resources on the upper left of the card.  For the General Store (above), it’s one Wood, one Resin, and one Stone. If you don’t have the resources, you can’t play the card.

Interestingly, you can also play cards from the board (the Meadow) into your “town”!  It really depends on where the Sun and the Moon are!!

The Sun and Moon are tokens that move left to right on the board.  See above.  Once they have both reached the last space, that season is over!   There are 4 Seasons total: Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn. Once all seasons are done, the game is over! Add up point to see who won!

At the end of the season, each characters gets some special effects (draw a card from the meadow (the board), create resources from Green cards, get resources, etc).  The Season tiles above also specify who goes first!

The Sun and Moon tokens add an unusual twist in the game.   The Sun token advances whenever any player plays a worker.  There are only 5-7 or so spaces for the sun (depending on the mode, campaign, etc), so that means that maybe a limited number of worker placement actions total; someone may likely get screwed out of a worker placement action!

The Moon token advances whenever anyone buys a card from the board or their hand.  See above; if a character buys, they can instead buy any of the 4 adjacent cards to the moon!  That’s kind of different and interesting!

The game is all about trying to get the right resources to get the right cards to get the right combos to get the most victory points!

Solo Play

There are two solo modes (Congratulations on following Saunders’ Law)! One of two solo mode for this game is playing the cooperative mode (2-Player only), except that the solo player plays both the Hare and the Tortoise; this is the Campaign solo mode.   For 4 seasons, the solo player alternates between the Hare and Tortoise until the Sun and Moon reach the end of the track … then head to the next season!

The solo mode (really, the two-handed cooperative mode) is, at least in the beginning, a victory point game.  The sum of the victory points of the Hare and the Tortoise need to exceed some threshold!

The cooperative mode is really is actually a campaign (sort of) of 15 ever harder chapters!  The first  game of the campaign (see above) is a simple start: get at least 85 Victory Points collectively and also get at least 4 Events (the big rewards)!  Luckily, you can play any campaign chapter you want as a one-shot: this is both Boon and Bane!  It’s Boon because you can play any of the 15 chapters of the campaign at any time, but it’s Bane because there’s really NO levelling up in this game.  It’s not really a campaign in the sense “your character gets better”; it’s just 15 scenarios that get harder.

What’s different about the Campaign solo/co-op mode is that there are SKUNKS blocking certain locations on the board!  See above as two SKUNKS blocks two spots on the Sun/Moon path (thus reducing the number of actions) and one SKUNK on the Worker Placement part of the bottom (this blocking one action).  This is how the game “simulates” blocking; every turn the players roll the die and move the SKUNKS to block spaces. 

I have to admit I struggled a little with the randomness of this game at first.  The cards in your hand or meadow are ENTIRELY random every game, and where the SKUNKS end up is ENTIRELY random.   I was very afraid I wouldn’t like the game because of this.  But, I think after getting through a bunch of games and getting the flow of the game, there always seemed to be ways to mitigate that randomness.  You can always top-deck a new card, you can usually play a card out of your hand if you can’t play from the Meadow, you can always choose to draw any card from the meadow, and you can always find SOME worker placement action to help you, even if it wasn’t exactly what you wanted.   Basically, you have to be able to pivot.   The game is more tactical than strategic, as you react to the current set-up of the game.

But, this Campaign solo/co-op mode is much more strategic; since you can work together (with yourself as the Tortoise and Hare) and plan together, your actions be more far-reaching!  

Note there is a Challenge solo/co-op mode in the game where you play against an AI opponent. I feel like, with the rules as they are,  the Challenge mode is a much more tactical game.   I strongly prefer the Campaign solo/co-op mode, as it feels like you can mitigate the randomness of the game much more by having the Tortoise and Hare collaborate.

There are two related issues I want to discuss more below.  But for now, let me say that I do like the solo 2-handed Campaign mode as it’s more strategic.  The Challenge mode was less to to my liking, as it felt more tactical.

And for solo mode, I completely ignored the Limited Communication rules; It makes sense to ignore this in the solo mode (of course you can communicate with yourself).   More discussion below.

Cooperative Play

Even after three solo games, I was still getting a few rules wrong.  As Teresa and I headed into a cooperative game (the campaign mode, not Challenge mode), she was the Hare and I was the Tortoise playing Chapter 1 of the Campaign.

There are rules for Communications Restrictions … which we completely ignored.  There are some restrictions on what you can communicate: “You may not tell your partner which cards you have in your hand, but you may tell them what color and types (Critter or Construction) you have, and what resources you want”.  We generally adhered to these rules, but that’s because we respect each others space.   Sometimes we would share a little more, but that made the game more engaging: “Ugh! I am struggling! I can’t do anything, how can I help you?”   I understand why cooperative games like this have Communications Restrictions:  they don’t want the game ruined by The Alpha Player (a player who tells everyone what to do!).  If you are playing Everdell: Duo with a person you trust and respect, these rules are insulting and take away from the enjoyment of the game.  I prefer to encourage working with my friends rather than hamstringing them with arbitrary Communications Limitations. 

That got more preachy than I wanted, but the game still seems to work even in you ignore the Communications Limitations. And it’s more fun.

Over one night, Teresa and I played and lost our first game. Then, Teresa liked the game so much, she wanted to play again!!

And we lost the second game too.  But we had fun playing!

Sharing

With the gameplay description I have given above, this game sounds very much multiplayer solitaire. And it mostly is, except for two things.  First of all, there is a “share” space!  At the end of every turn, each character can decide to share a single thing and put it on the tile above!  That thing can be a card, a resource, or an Occupied token.  

Interestingly, different Chapters of the Campaign turn on/off this sharing space, or reduce its scope (so you can only use it in the middle).  I noticed that I didn’t win a solo game until I actively started using the Sharing space.  It’s there for a reason, as it does encourage cooperation and strategy!

It might seem, other than the Sharing space, this game is just multiplayer solitaire.  After all, each player just tries to do they best they can on their turn, right?   I think, after several plays, I would say that is not true!  Because of the Sun/Moon move mechanism, each Season is restricted by how many worker placement and card buys characters can do—in order to get a full robust turn, the players must discuss the best play to enact a plan to make best use of the Season!  And that makes the game very cooperative!

What I Liked

The Components and Art:  The art of Andrew Bosley permeates this game, and it’s very striking.  The game is gorgeous and cute, and it looks nice on the table.

Cooperative Worker Placement:  The cooperative worker placement works very well in this game.  Everdell: Duo uses the SKUNKS to help block spaces, and with the characters collaborating, this works far better than I expected it to!

Duo: I really like playing this as a cooperative 2-Player game (in Campaign mode).  It seemed to work really well.  Of course, the solo mode was great too … because it is the same mode!

What I Didn’t Like

The Rulebook:  There were some great things about the rulebook, and some not so great things.  I think this rulebook needs one more pass by an editor.  In the end, I was able to learn the game from it, but it seemed harder than it should have …maybe it’s because I never played the original Everdell?  Maybe they expected me to know more about the game?

Randomness: I was worried about the randomness of the game; between the SKUNKS positions being decided by die rolls and the pure randomness of the Meadow, I was very worried the game might feel like too much. I will say, after playing a whole bunch of games solo and cooperatively, I haven’t seen this be a problem. I still worry about it.

Conclusion

Everdell: Duo worked for me as a solo game and for my friend as a 2-Player cooperative game.  The Campaign mode (misnamed, because no state changes between games) offers lots of replayability for the future.  Although there is a Challenge solo/co-op mode, I feel like the Campaign is the better mode, as it allows the players to be more strategic in a game that is fairly tactical overall.  

The games are  fairly short, but they offer a lot of interesting choices.  We found that, even if we lost, we wanted play again!  This was a testament to how much fun the game was.

If I were to suggest one major revision, I would eliminate the Communication Restrictions.  Just let me and my friend have fun and play how we want; I play games with my friend because I want to work with them and cooperate.  Restricting the Communication takes too much away from the cooperation, to the point of being less fun.

Overall, this is probably a 7.5 from both me and Teresa. It’s easy to pull out and play either solo or cooperatively, it’s gorgeous on the table, and it’s very cute. 

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pick up Valroc.  It was on Kickstarter again in September 2022: see here.  This second Kickstarter offered the base game and a cooperative expansion called Valroc: The Legend of Aquiny. 

The base game is a fully competitive drafting and worker placement game (with a solo mode).  See back of the base game above.

The expansion (The Legend of Aquiny) promises a fully cooperative mode with lots of envelopes to open!  Ooooh fun! See above.

The Valroc Kickstarter promised delivery in September 2023, but it ended up delivering in April 2024 sometime. See above.  For a Kickstarter, 6 months late isn’t bad.

Let’s take a look at this game!

Unboxing The Base Game

The base game is a fairly normal sized box: see Coke can above for perspective.

The game comes with a nice board: this board is for the worker placement part of the game.

There’s a lot of buying of things and acquiring of money: I ended up getting the metal coins (called Vals) which are quite nice.  The money is used to help you stuff in your worker placement phase.

This game is all about buying of the creatures in the game: see a bunch above (You have to get 6 to invoke the competitive endgame).   The right hand side of the card are all the resource prerequisites needed to acquire the creature.

There’s a lot of colored cubes and meeples: 4 colors for the 4 different players.

There’s a bunch of multi-use Action cards: see above. These same cards are used for digging, offerings, and training.  The section of the card you use depends on the activity; the cards are nice enough. 

The components are all quite nice and consistent.  Probably my favorites pieces in the game are the dual-layer player boards: see above.

In general, I think these guys did a great job with the production.  I thought the game looked really nice! See above!

Rulebook for Base Game

The rule book was okay.

It’s a little too big of The Chair Test (maybe a C+), but I can still read it.  At least it stays open and the font is readable. There’s a lot of white space: this could have easily been a smaller form factor to fit better on the chair next to me.

I was grumpy that there was no correlating pictures with the list of components.  The rulebook can “sorta” get away with that because there’s not too many components in the game.  I think, since this is a dual-language game (I think French and English), everything is labelled with abstract symbols, which was a little frustrating until you got used to it.

The set-up was decent, although they interspersed NUMBERS and LETTERS???  Each step should have been marked with one or the other: I found this unintuitive.  A couple of steps had multiple things exposed, which is why mixed NUMBERS for the steps and LETTERS for the items, but I felt like this would have been better served by having JUST numbers.  I think there were trying to do double duty and have the components list and set-up on only one pages.   I would have rather had the first 2 pages (which had ONLY a picture and some flavor test) list the components and then had the set-up steps be NUMBERS and labelled with NUMBERS.

Regardless, I was able to figure out what was going on.

I was also grumpy because the rules specify special set-up for 2 and 3 players .. what about the solo game?  Nope, you gotta wait for that … (so I can’t set-up the solo game just yet?)

There’s a very very nice list of creature cards to se for your first game.  

The rules were okay.  It’s very clear this game was originally a competitive game and the solo and cooperative modes were grafted on: Everything about this rulebook puts the competitive mode first and foremost. 

Later in the rulebook (why aren’t the pages numbered?) they finally have rules for the solo mode.  So, they are in there, but only after elaborating the competitive game.

There’s some nice explanations of symbols: see above.

The back cover has something called the Archmages path … which is really only useful to the solo player (see solo discussion in a later section below).

There is no index and this game really needs one!  Boo!  But there is a further elaboration of many of the cards later in the rulebook.

The rulebook was probably best for the competitive mode: first and foremost, this is a competitive game.    The lack of an index really hurt this game, because I was frequently trying to look up rules in the game, and I struggled to find things.  

The rulebook taught the game decently: I was able to learn the game from the rulebook.

Gameplay

Each player takes the role of a mage in the game. There’s no different deck or asymmetric powers: the mage color is used only to disambiguate players.

Each player starts the game with 3 worker placement tokens: left-to-right above: the assistant (tiny one), Wizard (hat), and Mercenary (nun hat?).   Each wizard also has resources: Fire, Water, Earth, and Air.   The mage himself slowly grows his resources in the game so he can acquire the creatures.

There’s also some MP (magic points in blue) that are used for many operations in the game.

Money is also an important resource the game: each player starts with 3 Vals.  

After you choose your Mage, you set-up for getting Creatures to acquire.  If you playing competitive, you draft (7 Wonders style) the creatures.  If you are playing solo or cooperative, you set-up a “river” of creatures (see above).

Either way, these represent the creature you can acquire: the resource prerequisites are on the right side of the creature cards.

The rest of the game is Worker Placement!  Players place their workers at one of the 8 spaces on the board (see above).  Some spaces can ONLY be used by the Wizard, some spaces can only be used by NOT the Wizard!  If you make an offering, you can also get the Monk worker for one round.

The players continue to play until they get to the endgame!   The solo, cooperative, and competitive games all have different ending conditions.  

But at its core, this is a worker placement game. Players manage money, MP, resources, creatures, their workers, and try to make the best tradeoffs they can.

Solo Game

Valroc does have a solo mode (thank you for following Saunders’ Law)!  My first play of a new games is almost always a solo game, as I have to learn the game to teach my friends!

Unfortunately, the solo mode seems to be less well-described in the rulebook. 

The pages describing the solo mode are full of text with almost no pictures (see above). I really struggled to get the solo mode going, especially the Offering phase.  There’s a LOT of rules changes for the solo mode, and I don’t think two pages was quite enough to cover everything.  Or at least, the solo rules needed some more elaborations.

I was able to get through a solo game to see how everything worked.

Instead of a drafting phase, creatures can only be acquired from the River (see above) … there is no drafting in the solo mode.

At it’s core the solo mode is basically the 2-Player mode, with a solo deck of cards controlling the second (opposing) player.  See above: the solo card tells you where to place the “opposing” players worker pawns. It’s basically an automata placing pawns to simulate “blocking” you.

The solo mode did work: I was able to play a learning game to get most of the concepts in the game so I could teach my friends.

I had three major problems with the solo mode.

One, it’s not quite the same as the competitive mode.  What do I mean by that?  For my purposes, I learn the solo game to play that game with my friends. The more”different” the solo mode is from the base game, the less useful it is for me.  The solo mode, although it introduced a lot of ideas of Valroc, was different enough in rules to be frustrating.  A bunch of rules had to change to play solo, so it was harder to switch gears that to the base game.

Two, the solo mode was exhausting: see above as it takes over the table!!  The solo player has to do everything, including playing the second opposing player! And the rules for the second opposing player are different than your rules.  So, I frequently had to stop and discern “What does it mean when the opposing player goes there versus when I go there?” I found the solo mode to be a lot of upkeep work, as I placed my workers, the opposing players workers, all the while trying to lookup rules differences.

Third, the solo mode “win” condition is not very satisfying … it is not a win condition but a CAMPAIGN win condition?   You have to play 8 to 10 FULL GAMES and try to get as many checks on the Archmages path (the chart on the back of the rulebook: see above).  At first, I thought that was a misprint!  Surely, they can’t mean you need to play 8 to 10 FULL GAMES to “win”?  In other words, you can’t just play a single solo game for fun to see if you win … a win is described ONLY as a result of a 8 to 10 game campaign!!!  If there was a more meaningful “single solo play” win condition, I might like the solo game more, but I don’t want to feel like I am tethered to a 8 to 10 FULL GAME CAMPAIGN to enjoy this!   

I liked the solo mode well enough, and it taught me most of the game basics, but as an entry point into the Valroc universe, it could have been significantly better.

Competitive Mode

At its core, I think Valroc is best as a competitive Worker Placement game.  The rulebook puts the Victory point/Worker Placement game first … because I suspect that’s how it was developed.

The core drafting phase is kind of fun: this sort of reminds of many competitive games like Res Arcana or Seasons where players draft at the start of the game to get the initial game going.

The competitive game isn’t too cut-throat: it tends to be more multi-player solo, where each player does his own thing (unless we get in each others way).  There were a few take-that cards and mechanisms in the game (mostly in the Dark Magic area, and the University area with the Lessons cards), but they only came out occasionally.  I would probably consider taking the take-that cards out of the game: none of my groups particularly like that aspect.

The funnest part of this game is trying to balance all your resources (Vals, Fire/Earth/Water/Air, Magic Points, Creatures) to maximize your victory points at the end of the game. How do you place your workers to get the best results for yourself while steering your opponent(s) away? 

I feel like this game is best for people who like Seven Wonders and Lords of Waterdeep: the drafting is fun to set-up the game, and the worker placement is fairly straight-forward like Lords of Waterdeep.

Sam texted me after we played through the competitive game: He said something like:

“Valroc reminds me a lot of Res Arcana.  The drafting in the beginning, the resources, and such make me feel that people who like Res Arcana might like this game”.

The Legends of Aquiny Unboxing

The cooperative mode was the reason I picked up this Kickstarter. It’s a full box with a “whole new game mode” for playing Valroc cooperatively!

This is obviously a campaign cooperative mode.  Look at all those cool envelopes!  My group and I were excited for this … we were looking forward to opening the envelopes!  What do we get??

The Adventure book (above) outlines the campaign and the rulebook (below) describes the changes.

Basically, this is a campaign over 10 Chapters … see above.

We look forward to these envelopes!

Cooperative Play

We were all excited for the cooperative play!  The cooperative play appeared to be a real full expansion!   Remember when we got a cooperative expansion for Thunderstone Quest!? It was its own thing!

Unfortunately, the cooperative game didn’t go well.  My friends did not enjoy this at all.

First of all, my friends hated the Limited Communication.  You can only communicate in the Communications phases (see rules above).  You could be standing next to each other in the Arena or any place on the board, but you still can’t talk!   I might take a creature from the river that my friend wanted and he couldn’t say anything!

There’s the notion of a Communication token (which you can use ONCE per game), but even that didn’t feel like enough communication.

It just felt like we took our turns in silence as we played.  We even “narrated” our turns just to break the silence.  

We also didn’t like how slow the upgrade path was.  Remember those cool envelopes?  Finishing a chapter in the campaign made it so we could open an envelope! COOL!  … but only one player could upgrade??? And you were told which character!!!   So, the next chapter would have one character being stronger … and no one else would be …  It wasn’t fun for the rest of the players.  I looked at a few more envelopes … it was more of the the same.  We all said the same thing: Lame.  We ALL want to upgraded every adventure!!

The cooperative rules were okay.  They worked.  

Me and my friends didn’t like the cooperative rules.  The cooperative rules felt grafted on: they didn’t seem to enough of the fundamental change needed to make Valroc feel cooperative. 

Communications Limitations

Recall that we just ended up “ignoring” a lot of the communication limitations in Hacktivity  weeks ago … because it didn’t seem like a big deal.  Hacktivity is a lighter game, and having real communication made the game more fun!!   Here in Legends of Aquiny … it felt like breaking this limitation would break the game.  I don’t know, we did NOT like this limitation.  Our turns were couched in silence.

A lot of time, Communications Limitations feel like a “crutch” designers use:

“You can make a game cooperative by just adding Communications Limitations!!  Just play the game cooperatively but you can’t talk!” 

The typical justification is that, by limiting communications in cooperative games:

 1. You can get rid of the Alpha Player: the Alpha Player can’t tell you what to do if he can’t talk!

2. You can avoid analysis paralysis: If you can’t talk, you can’t talk with each other to over-analyze

3. You can shorten the game: the game is quicker if you can’t talk!

Here’s the thing: I want to talk to my friends!  If it means I am enjoying the game by discussing things with my friends, I am okay with that.  If my friends want to find a better and optimal path, sure, let’s over-analyze  a little!  At least I am engaged and talking with my friends as opposed to sitting in silence as we play!

One of my friends (I forget who) made this brilliant observation:

“Limited Communication may actually cause analysis paralysis as you try to guess and figure what each other player might do! If they can tell you what they can do, that gets rid of the extra analysis!”

I think they are onto something: Limited Communication can cause the same Analysis Paralysis they are trying to get rid of!

In the end, my friends and I prefer cooperative games without Limited Communication.  Limited Communication is just less fun.

Conclusion

Valroc seems best as a competitive worker placement game for 2-4 players: it feels as that as how it was first designed and how it plays best.  If you like Res Arcana, Seven Wonders, or Lords of Waterdeep, this might be a good game for you. This is probably a 6.5/10 or 7/10.

The solo mode is okay and works, but there’s too much upkeep per turn, the win condition is not satisfying (it requires a 8 to 10 game campaign), and the rules seem less well-described in the rulebook.  The solo mode is probably a 5.5/10.  With a few tweaks (give me better descriptions in the rulebook and a more satisfying single game win), this could get a better score: I would welcome a second edition for the solo mode.  The rulebook does teach most of the principles of the game if you want to try it solo.

If you, like me, you picked up Valroc (and the expansion) for the cooperative game, I think you will be deeply unsatisfied.  Legends of Aquiny feels very much like a grafted-on cooperative mode: the limited communication feels stifling and the upgrade path in the envelopes is too slow.  I can’t recommend the cooperative game.  It worked as a game, but it wasn’t fun.  My group would probably give it a 4/10 overall: they did not have fun and they did not want to continue playing.  

Valroc seems best as the base game: a competitive worker placement game.