Forest Shuffle Review

boardgamequest.com:

I’m a big fan of what I like to call “deck-searching” games. Players draw from a shared deck, filled with scoring opportunities and special abilities, and try to build as efficient a tableau as possible—your Arks Nova, your Races for the Galaxies, and so on. That said, the more of these games I play, the fewer I feel I need to own.

It’s not that newer games are worse or derivative, but the draw of these games for me is diving into that Scrooge McDuckian pool of possibilities and seeing how much gold I can pull from it. Without a memorable hook, newer games face an uphill battle against games whose decks I have more familiarity with. Still, I love to be proven wrong, and the latest challenger to ring the bell is Forest Shuffle. How does it stack up?

Forest Shuffle is a tableau-building card game for 2-5 players. It takes about 45-60 minutes to play and plays best with 2-3 players.

Forest Shuffle’s structure is pretty loose, with no phases or rounds to speak of. Instead, on each turn you choose from one of just two options:

Cards may be drawn randomly from the deck, or from a face-up area called the clearing. The clearing starts empty but grows as players discard cards to it. However, if the clearing ever has ten or more cards at the end of a turn, it is immediately emptied out again.

How you play a card depends on its type. Trees can be played on their own and take up an entire card’s worth of space, but all other cards are split down the middle (vertically or horizontally) and must be played attached to an existing tree, tucking the other half underneath. Trees can have a card attached on all four sides, but only one card can be played on each side.

Regardless of type, when you play a card, you must pay its cost by discarding that many cards from your hand to the clearing—and, if the played card is a tree, adding an additional card to the clearing from the top of the deck. You may then activate that card’s effect, if it has one. Some cards also have a bonus effect,