Rainforest City Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Rainforest City, a tile laying card game published by Origame Games. In Rainforest City, players are drafting cards and playing them to a grid to score the most points.

For most of my life, I’ve lived in the suburbs where wildlife is a feral cat or birds. I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of summer vacations camping at the mountains and beaches of Southern California. So I’ve always enjoyed the great outdoors and have a fond appreciation of nature. Nature is awe-inspiring when you consider the variety of environments and diversity of plants and animals around our planet. We need to protect and preserve some of these unique environments both for future generations to enjoy as well as for scientists to study.

Rainforest City has the players trying to reverse that effect by repopulating the Singaporean landscape. In this competitive or cooperative game players are trying to build the best balanced landscape across three different ecosystems.

Each game is 12 total turns which means games with more players have fewer rounds in them. On a player’s turn, they turn the square fruit dial and take both cards their fruit icon is pointing at. The other players get to pick one of the two cards their fruit is facing. Cards are either terrain, which gets added to your Landscape, or Flora or Fauna cards which add tokens to your landscape.

Selected terrain cards can be played in any orientation as long as one square lines up with the existing terrain. Any terrain can be adjacent to any other terrain. Some terrain cards come with icons on them that add flora or fauna. Some have houses that are worth points but you lose one point for flora or fauna tokens adjacent to them. They also make you discard a specific flora or fauna