Caverna: The Cave Farmers
Expand a dwarven cave, farm the surrounding land, raise animals, mine ore and furnish rooms across a sprawling worker-placement economy.
Place dwarven workers on shared action spaces to gather materials, farm, raise animals, mine ore and expand a cave system.
Rooms and furnishings specialize your cave, while expeditions and agriculture open different economic routes. Family growth increases action capacity but also feeding requirements.
Why We Love It
Caverna offers broad freedom inside a worker-placement structure. Farming, mining, expeditions, animals and cave furnishing all compete for actions, so the puzzle is less about following one scripted path and more about building a workable economy.
About Caverna: The Cave Farmers
Place dwarven workers on shared action spaces to gather materials, farm, raise animals, mine ore and expand a cave system.
Rooms and furnishings specialize your cave, while expeditions and agriculture open different economic routes. Family growth increases action capacity but also feeding requirements.
Game at a Glance
Mine and Furnish
Expand the cave and add rooms that reshape your economy.
Farm the Land
Build fields and pastures for crops and animals.
Run Expeditions
Arm dwarves and convert expedition strength into flexible rewards.
Balance the Homestead
Grow the family without letting feeding and unused space undermine the score.
What is Caverna: The Cave Farmers?
Caverna: The Cave Farmers is Uwe Rosenberg’s 2013 farming-and-cave-development game for 1–7 players. Lookout’s expansion documentation preserves the base game’s roughly 30-minutes-per-player timing and seven-player support.
The game reworks ideas from Agricola while adding cave rooms, mines, weapons and expeditions.
How the game works
Players place family members on shared action spaces to collect resources, build rooms, expand fields and pastures, raise animals, mine ore and rubies or forge weapons.
Home boards have both farm and cave areas. Furnishing caverns and covering the outdoor landscape create distinct but connected development paths.
The decisions that define it
Caverna rewards balancing breadth and efficiency. Expanding into many systems can open scoring opportunities, but every family member used for one plan is unavailable for another.
Weapon expeditions add another layer because stronger dwarves can claim better rewards, but building that strength costs actions and ore.
Who is it for?
Choose Caverna if you want a heavy sandbox worker-placement game with solo support and unusually broad player-count flexibility.
Choose Agricola for a tighter, more card-driven challenge or A Feast for Odin for an even larger spatial economy puzzle.
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Publisher sources & scope
Checked September 16, 2026. This hub covers Caverna: The Cave Farmers base game, not Forgotten Folk, Frantic Fiends or Cave vs. Cave.