Forest Shuffle Second Opinion

Where Our Story Begins

Forest Shuffle from Lookout Games is a game about creating your own ecosystem. You have a hand of cards all with either a tree, or two tree dwelling flora or fauna displayed on them. You are of course trying to jump in and get the most victory points, this time by building the best ecosystem of trees, animals, insects and flowers. This is a beautifully illustrated card game that is simple in its teaching and strategic in its playstyle. If you are looking for something with a cute theme and infinite replayability then you simply cannot go wrong with picking up this gem.

Basic Gameplay

This is a drafting, set collection and combination scoring game. You spend your turn either picking two cards from those in the face up forest market, or blindly from the deck. Or you can play a card from your hand, discarding cards to pay its cost. Simple. You play until the third winter card is revealed when gameplay immediately ceases. These winter cards are shuffled into the bottom third of the forest card deck, so you sort of know when they are due, but not exactly when they will come out. This is the timer of the game, and depending on your strategy, you may want to rush the game to its close or try to avoid taking cards to elongate the game.

Cards are arranged around trees. Once you have a tree in your forest, you will be able to place a card above, below, to the left and to the right of it. You will be trying to create synergies between the cards that you place, for example if you have a fox then this will score best if you also have European hares in your forest. A squirrel will score best if it is on an oak tree. Boars want to be with squeakers and so on. Each card also has a colour or two on it, if you manage to pay for your card by discarding cards of the matching colour then you will unlock a bonus. You will trying to secure the best cards into your forest whilst also not discarding cards that help your opponent too much. Keeping a well stocked forest of trees is also important to ensure that you have space to play these excellent cards too. It is a balancing act in strategic card play, and I love it.

For a very simple to learn and play game, there is devilish complexity in working out the best option for you. Many of the cards have scoring dependent on set collection or having other symbiotic cards present in your ecosystem. The beauty of card play comes in being able to pay for cards using the right coloured cards and activating their special ability. Generally these can be things like helping you play another animal for free, or drawing some cards or even just getting a whole other turn.

As the player count increases the game time will likely not change as the deck of cards is the same size. The scores will be lower the higher the player count as you all fight over the same cards for your forest. We have thoroughly enjoyed this game at 2 players, and as neither of us is trying to rush the game, have found that this has meant we were able to achieve some monster scores.

Components

Forest Shuffle is a pretty simple game in terms of components and really it is just cards with a small board. The board is pretty simple in design but very beautiful and honestly is superfluous to requirements as you simply need to wipe it after ten cards are placed into the forest.

The cards are the most important, these ARE the game! These have in my opinion utterly beautiful depictions of various fauna and flora on them. The animals (and insect/flora) cards are split either horizontally or vertically, but I have not found that this means they are tough to read. The trees are striking in their simple design which makes them easy to pick out of your hand. The colours are depicted with differing leaf icons which aid with quickly seeing which colours match. I will stress however that this does not help the colour blind amongst us as the trigger section for the benefit does not contain these icons.

One thing I really appreciate is that there is a deck of cards which give further details on how each animal works. These are in alphabetical order and are a pretty good quick read to refer to. I also appreciate this means that the rulebook can remain a simple leaflet which is ideal.

Replayability

If you are looking for a game that has almost no rules overhead but will usually feel different each time you play, then Forest Shuffle could be a hit for you. Each of the cards has different scoring abilities and varied scoring synergies too. We have had fun trying out varying strategies, from placing down all the trees possible in favour of animal cards, to maxing out every tree we have with as many cards as possible.

We have found that game time is a little longer than you would expect as your brain tries to calculate the best strategy. Some people may because of this always default to their previous strategy. Seemingly this is deer and wolves or foxes and rabbits in our opinion. I think it is necessary to make sure that no one player can get all the deer because these not only synergise but also create huge scoring opportunities of their own. I wonder if the deer are slightly too powerful, although they are expensive to place so perhaps that balances it out.

Round Up

For me, Forest Shuffle is a contender for game of the year for 2023. Lookout games tend to put out a lot of cool games that I love, but this one was a surprise with how simple it was to learn. There are so many different animals and they all work differently but it is pretty easy to get a grip on what you are doing. There are so many different strategies that will alter based on cards that make this feel like a game I won’t get bored of.