Best Treehouse Ever First Impressions

Build the best Treehouse ever.

Obviously.

Who hasn’t dreamed of building the best treehouse in the world? Now it’s time to live that dream!

In Best Treehouse Ever, players compete to build their best treehouse, outfitting their treehouse with cool rooms, while also making sure that their tree doesn’t tip over and that their rooms are more impressive than all of their friends’ rooms at the end of the game.

This is a drafting game where you have a handful of cards and pick one to add to your Treehouse. There are a couple of placement rules to follow…

Balance

Firstly, you have to keep your Treehouse balanced. Once you place a room, you have to move a token to show the current tilt of your tree. Play one to the left of your Tree, and move it left one space. Play it to the right, and move it right.

If the token is to the left or right you can’t play one on that side until you’ve balanced it up.

Also, when placing a room of a certain colour in your Treehouse for the first time you can play it anywhere, but subsequent rooms must be next to one of the same colour. This means if you’re not careful you can block yourself off as I did with my Red and Blue rooms.

Scoring

After you have drafted and played (or not played if got blocked off) you score a round. In order, you draft a card that either stops a colour of room scoring or doubles its value from 1 point to 2 per room… There are 2 of each.

Then in reverse turn order, you cover a card representing one of the colours of rooms with these scoring cards.

After 5 rounds of this, players score points for having a majority of each colour. You also have a goal card at the beginning of the game which gives you a Triangle of 3 rooms and a row of 3 rooms to aim for, these give 3 and 4 points each. Most points win.

Best Treehouse Ever Summary

It’s a very nice and simple game. A new player can draft cards, get the balance right, try not to block off colours and make a nice looking, colourful Treehouse and see how many points they get.

Give it to a bunch of gamers and they hate draft, leaving you with cards you can’t play, block outscoring tactically, go for end-game majorities from turn 1 and even maybe tactically block out colours of their own if they feel it’s right. They will tactically score, or ignore their bonus card.

Being able to do both of these things is the sign of a good game for me, and it’s pretty quick too.

I do worry about longevity though. You’re doing the same thing every game and there isn’t any variety. The rooms are fun and funny to have. (such as an Arcade or Water Slide) But they are just 6 colours basically…

Still, it is fun, it’s cheap and comes in a small box. Having it to play 2-3 times a year won’t be a waste of money or shelf space.

Jesta ThaRogue