With a player count fluctuating between 4-6, we needed options that could play both quick, with a large number of people. A pretty tall order! Enters Forest Shuffle, a card game that has you build your own forest with an entire ecosystem to go around it. While the base game is advertised as 2-5 players, we played it by 6 with 2 extensions (Alpine and Woodland Edge). My first glance at the cards made me expect some kind of Wingspan variant... but that really didn't do this game justice!
2-5
60mn
10+
Setup: Getting started is really as quick as it gets
- Set the clearing (eg, place the board at the center of the table)
- Get your starting cards (6)
- Set the remaining cards by the clearing with an extra 3 winter cards shuffled in
And away you go!
Gameplay: each turn you get to do 1 of 2 things:
- Draw 2 cards, either face up in the clearing or face down from the deck
- Play a card
This, however, is deceptively simple. For starters, there are 2 major types of cards: trees and the rest. You need the trees to play any other cards, typically 1 per edges of a tree card (ie, 4). Then, all cards come with a stated cost (0 to 3) which correspond to the cards you'll need to discard into the clearing. Most importantly, all cards follow an elaborate iconography that details what effect they trigger when played and how they are scored; this drives the players' decision-making and takes a minute to decipher, with the help of the rulebook, but it's streamlined well enough so that you only need a few turns to figure the basics out. And lastly, the game ends once all 3 winter cards are drawn from the deck.
Theme: It's a pretty snug fit! The non-tree cards sports all kind of animals & plants that combo off of one another based following very intuitive patterns. For instance, rabbits thwart the "1 card per edge rule" by allowing unlimited stacking; foxes, in turn, will score the most based on how many rabbits you have, but so will some predatory birds. This has the immediate benefit of always having a sense of which card is likely to be important to you, even if you're seeing for the first time. Arguably, this also makes it an interesting educational, family pick.
Impression: This game absolutely fits the "easy to learn, hard to master" paradigm: it is surprisingly intuitive for the amount of complexity it packs. And despite the complexity, the balance was pretty solid: no strategy felt obviously dominant. I initially didn't know what to make of the "shuffle" part of the name, but after playing a few times it feels obvious now: the game encourages you to be nimble rather than married to any one strategy; depending how the game unfolds, you may find yourself cycling through plan A, B and C in quick successions. The game truly shines competitively with less players, but remains absolutely relevant for casual players with more; it does require a fair bit of real estate to play though, so consider this before committing to a 5-6 players game!
TLDR: A great game that is approachable, relatively quick to play and yet offers strong competitive potential.
Score: 9/10
Cheers,
Ady
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