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[rhubork]

Hi, I'm not sure if this goes here but it seemed like the best place.

I love DF and I love the board game Caverna and I was thinking of ways to modify Caverna so it's more like Dwarf Fortress.

First I was wondering if anyone has done this.  It seems to me a natural variant.

I was thinking of adding a dice throw for some hazards like animals not breeding or dying, dwarves getting sick or trampled by elephants, crops failing, rooms caving in, storms wrecking pens and fields.  "Adventurers" stealing your things, killing your dwarves.  No begging, just starving or real begging from other players.

I usually play the solitaire version, so it would be nice to make it so that surviving to the end of the turns is the goal.  Maybe have easy and hard rule variants.

Beyond that it would be neat to make it a cooperative game, maybe extend or loop the turns so you could build big farms, let players have more than one farm board.

Just a thought.  What do you guys think?  Been done already?  There's got to be some Caverna rule variant community but I haven't found it.  Here I thought I had mad googling skills.

If you don't know Caverna it's a euro board game with a lot of pieces, and dwarves and caves and farms and excavation, but the similarity with DF is not very deep and almost null with the game play mechanics.  It's all resource placement and get richer than your neighbors.  It does have parts that seem to be easily adapted to a DF style game.  I'm starting to work up some rules Caverna meets DF.

[Gwolfski]

Interesting

[Shonai_Dweller]

Get yourself a Kickstarter. DF the boardgame would be very cool.
I've only briefly looked at Caverna, but would an expansion pack (full of FB meeples and artifacts) work? Or would you be better off starting from scratch?

[askovdk]

I too enjoy both games 

An idea that could work well in a board game version is 'digging -> increasing danger'.
In the old 2d days of DF digging right would (IIRC) a river -> a chasm -> magna -> HFS. With 3d 'down' became the new 'right', but the idea that digging may suddenly expose something dangerous but profitable could work well in Caverna by adding an additional grid into the mountain.
To force players to dig deeper it could be that ruby mines can only be made behind the chasm, and metal mines behind the river, - or perhaps only allow a limited amount of mines in each sector.