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.
Gameplay Overview:
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:
- Draw two cards (to a maximum of ten), or
- Play a card.
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, which only triggers if you pay for that card exclusively with cards of a matching resource type.
Play continues like this until three winter cards (seeded in the bottom of the deck during setup) are revealed, at which point the game ends immediately. Players count up all the points earned from the cards in their forest, and the player with the most points wins.
Game Experience:
Forest Shuffle’s scoring is easily its least interesting aspect—it’s not bad, but it’s not particularly exciting. The scoring criteria comprise all the set-collection varieties you would expect from a tableau-builder, and it’s extremely time-consuming to actually tally points, with scores being calculated from dozens of individual cards. There is some fun thematic integration here (predators want to feed on prey, rabbits like to multiply without limit, etc…), but it’s definitely not the main attraction.
Instead, the secret sauce is in how you interact with those scoring criteria. You can’t just play your cards willy-nilly; you need a tree to hold them, and cards to pay for them. Cards with strong synergy tend to take up the same tree slot, which forces you to compromise. And, there are quite a few different ways to score, so you can’t just pick one strategy and commit to it–you need to stay flexible, often balancing several competing objectives.
Considerations like this make Forest Shuffle a neat puzzle, but the player interaction makes the game truly shine. Whenever you pay for a card, you’re filling up the clearing with fresh new cards for others to hungrily devour, and you will be crushed if you aren’t careful about withholding the right cards. You have to choose when to deny cards from others, when to pursue your own strategies, and when to risk leaving cards you need out in the open.
It’s a cutthroat bit of design, but Forest Shuffle always feels breezy thanks to its turn structure. All you do each turn is draw two cards or play one, which keeps things quick and uncomplicated, even with so many tactical considerations. Despite its modern trappings of card combos and tableau building, Forest Shuffle feels more like an old card game–smooth, amiable, and uncomplicated.
Unfortunately, this combination of old and new design philosophies does create occasional friction. Forest Shuffle is fairly demanding—experienced players can and will crush newbies without appropriate guardrails—but it’s still a big deck of cards, which leads to swingy play and strokes of luck. Close games don’t always feel as close as they should when a single card can generate dozens of points. Conversely, as a breezy card game, Forest Shuffle is less approachable than it wants to be. The iconography is a bit intimidating, and the game takes up a tremendous amount of table space for how few components it uses.
Final Thoughts:
I mentioned in my intro that newer deck-searching games need a hook to hold my interest. Well, Forest Shuffle’s hook is to combine modern, combo-chasing sensibilities with the rhythm and interaction of old-school card games. The result is a delightful mix of breezy card play and cutthroat tactics, a game I feel comfortable reaching for with a wide variety of people and play styles and feel compelled to reach for over and over again.
Final Score: 4.5 Stars – A combo-filled tableau builder with the vibe of a classic card game.
Hits:
• Trees and double-ended cards present an interesting puzzle
• Cutthroat player interaction, but maintains an easygoing rhythm
• Cute thematic integration
• Feels fresh even after a dozen plays
Misses:
• Unexciting and finicky scoring criteria
• Takes up a surprising amount of table space
• Swinginess of the card draw is at odds with the game’s ruthlessness
