Forest Shuffle is a card game of planting trees and flooding them with wildlife.
Can you arrange your ecosystem to get the most points?
Gather the most valuable trees, then attract species to these trees, thus creating an ecologically balanced habitat for flora and fauna.
Forest Shuffle Game Overview
Quick Rules Summary
Players have a hand of cards. These cards are the various trees, flora and fauna mentioned in the blurb.
On a player’s turn, they may draw 2 cards either from the top of the deck or the clearing (a face-up discard area) in the middle of the table.
Instead, they can play a card from their hand into their play area. Cards have a cost and you must discard a number of cards from your hand to pay that cost into the clearing. If you play a tree, one additional card is added from the top of the deck into the clearing.
Cards also have a coloured symbol and some cards will trigger an ability when played if the discarded cards used to pay match the colour on the ability.
Flora and Fauna cards are split in half and are placed around the trees depending on the side of the card you played.
How do you win?
In the bottom third of the deck are a number of winter cards and when the final one is drawn the game ends.
Players add points from their played cards. Each score differently and many will combo with each other. For example, I had 4 butterflies that scored points the more you had and (I think) a badger that scored points for each butterfly I had too.
Most points wins.
Main Mechanisms
Hand management is the main one as you have to discard cards to pay for the cards you play. That and tableau building obviously. There is also set collection and a kind of pseudo-engine building thing that runs at the end of the game.
USP
The USP is the split cards and the way you add them around trees. I’m sure this has been done before but to theme it this well hasn’t been done before as far as I know.
Theme
The theme is pretty good. The cards not only score in different ways but they score thematically to the item on the card. So wolves want to see deer etc
Setup
Shuffle the deck really well after putting those winter cards in the bottom third. You also remove some cards if not playing with the full 5 players.
Components & Artwork
I think the artwork is really good and suits the theme perfectly.
The iconography is also good for the most part. Most things make sense and each colour icon has a different symbol to help with any vision issues.
I would say the cards are standard but this is in a range of green games and it says, “FSC-certified paper and avoiding plastic completely” which is really cool.
Ease of Teaching
The game is easy to teach and once you work out the symbology there is nothing to worry about.
Similar Games
There are quite a few games like this, card games with different ways to score etc
Arboretum and Village Green come to mine, keeping with the relaxing nature theme.
Forest Shuffle Review
Positives
Quick and easy gameplay with quick turns.
The game looks really nice.
Building combos is satisfying.
You always have something to aim for, starting with your opening hand.
Negatives
Not having the card you need available to you is annoying sometimes, especially when it’s just one with a certain colour symbol so you can discard it to pay for another card and get the bonus.
Scoring takes a while.
Summary
A very fun game that you’ll want to play again.
Jesta ThaRogue