Savernake Forest

Oh my! Winter is heading to Savernake Forest and all the wee woodland creatures need to stock up on yummy food to keep them going over the lean months. Now if that alone hasn’t drawn you into this lovely game, read on and get ready to fall for these furry food finders!

A Path To…

Savernake Forest is an open drafting, tableau building game for 2-4 players where we are each trying to create a network of paths that our cute woodland critters can follow to gather food. But each of the 23 different animals in the forest have number one nom noms that they really want to store. And they are all greedy-gobblers which means paths in your 4 x 4 grid must not intersect. So, it’s our job to make sure our tableau connects these creatures to their favourite foods.

So, in the game, there are 2 decks of cards; path cards and animal cards. Path cards show a section of path together with a number of different food items located along the way. Animal cards show the basic point value for the card, the base storage capacity of the wee creature, and its personalised base scoring for 4 different foods.

Everybody starts with one random animal card. Then, on your turn, you pick one card from the pool comprising 3 path cards and 1 animal card. But the cards are arranged underneath 4 special animals who award an instant bonus;

• Rooster – this rewards the player with the first player token for next round
• Goat – this gives a water droplet which gets added to one corner of one animal card to boost the value of that food type found along the path its connected to by 1 point
• Armadillo – this gives a burrow token which gets used to increase the storage capacity of an animal; and
• Rabbit – this is the only way you can add creatures to your tableau

Once you have picked your card, you add it to your tableau (yep, the adjacency rule is in operation!), and activate the special power associated with it. Note that the row isn’t refreshed until all players have taken a turn.

After 16 rounds, each player will have built their tableau of 4 x 4 (or 8 x 3 in advanced 2P mode). Then it’s time to tot up the points and see who is the most winter ready of them all!

Final Thoughts

This is a light, fun, super cute placement optimisation puzzle. Like snow on the forest floor, there is a sprinkling of think that makes it really engaging and accessible to players of all experience levels. Being neurospicy, my spatial skills are woefully poor. And all of my woodland tableaus to date have included paths that lead to nowhere or animals that have no path at all thanks to earlier choices that have left my last spots useless. But with so many ways to boost storage and points on other creatures’ cards, there’s myriad ways for me to turn tactics and catch up! And in fact, I have been winning as much as I have lost out to far more spatially skilled players!

Everything in Savernake Forest is open-information, and I love that. It presents an opportunity for a little hatey play if you’re that way included (we are!). But the cuteness of the cards and the theme dulls down any real sting. Plus, it’s likely that you’ll be so focussed on building out your own network of paths that you won’t really bother messing with what others are picking.

Now, you may think that choosing first player token is always going to be too tempting. But the clever draw of increased storage and added food points definitely makes it less of an obvious choice each round. And only being able to get more point scoring animals by choosing the card under the Rabbit is also neat because it presents that tricky trade off moment; path card to boost points for an existing animal v animal card for new scoring opportunities! Knowing you might be able to make a new path and gain lots of points could push you to go for another animal…….but then those raspberry laden straights and elbows might never appear! Saverneaky!

Savernake Forest is one those games where you are pretty much the architect of your own success (or demise!). And being someone who always likes to be in control, it hits the right spot for me. The draw does introduce a little luck and there’s little interaction other than possible hate drafting. There are also no extra scoring objectives besides the main game goal itself, so its purely paths or poor points! But ultimately, that means it’s your own choices that will determine how well (or not so well!) you do. And that’s just how we like it! My only slight sadness comes in that that there’s no solo mode. Personally, I would love to sit down and play this little box of puzzliness by myself

But, the components are lovely; wooden player tokens, a wee double sided board (flip over at the end for final game scoring), and the illustrations are so cute! And so, whether winter is coming or not, I Love playing in Savernake Forest!