Forest Shuffle fits into a wide category of games I own, where the following statement somehow makes perfect sense to me:
“This game doesn’t need an expansion, but I desperately want one.”
Why? Is this some deep-seated part of the human psyche? Have I been so thoroughly conditioned as a consumer to always crave new toys to buy? Am I just a lunatic?
No time to delve into these questions—Forest Shuffle: Woodland Edge is here! It’s a small set of cards for an already-huge deck, and I could not be more excited.
Expansion Overview:
Woodland Edge adds a total of 36 new cards to be shuffled into the draw deck. The most notable of these are shrubs, a brand-new card type that works as a cross between trees and mushrooms. Shrubs have slots for cards, but don’t score any points and don’t count as trees for any other purpose. Instead, they have an ongoing ability, allowing players to draw a card when they play certain types of cards.
The other new cards mostly serve to interact with the expansion, or with the more neglected elements of the base game:
- Nightingales score points if they’re attached to shrubs, and European Wildcats score for every expansion card in your forest.
- Water Voles let you free play saplings from your hand.
- Bee Swarms and Eurasian Magpies grant additional ways to add cards to your cave.
- Barn Owls and Crane Flies build more synergy with your bat swarms.
- Stinging Nettles let you stack multiple butterflies on a single tree.
- Digitalis scores points depending on the number of different plants in your forest.
- A new type of Wild Boar provides even an higher scoring potential from those cute little squeakers.
Some cards also have a new effect, letting you draw cards directly from the display instead of the deck. Finally, Woodland Edge contains a new butterfly and bat species, as well as a few miscellaneous cards that round out the existing card pool.
Game Experience with the Expansion:
The more I play Woodland Edge, the more I appreciate it. At first, I was ready to write it off as “fine, but inessential”—and to some extent, that’s still true. Forest Shuffle is a great game, and the expansion doesn’t make a tremendous impact. In fact, it’s possible (though rare) to never see any expansion cards at lower player counts, due to how many get removed during setup.
However, it’s also unfair to dismiss the expansion as just “more stuff.” The cards in Woodland Edge do a lot to round out aspects of the base game that felt less interesting. The new cards involving bats, butterflies, and plants make those card types feel more dynamic to play with, since there are now more pathways to score off them. It’s not revolutionary, but it makes you reevaluate certain cards and strategies, which is great.
Whenever a big deck has more cards stuffed into it, you run the risk of it become unbalanced—strategies become less reliable, randomness skyrockets, and the overall experience goes off the rails. Luckily, Woodland Edge largely manages to sidestep these issues. The new cards feel pretty in line with the base game, and I didn’t feel like the existing combos were too watered down.
Surprisingly, the new shrub cards are actually my least favorite part of this expansion. I don’t hate them, but they’re less interesting than they could have been. Whereas each different tree has a unique way to score, every shrub variety boils down to “draw a card when you play card type X,” which isn’t nearly as exciting. They also represent the single exception to my above comments about randomness. Without more trees to maintain the base game’s ratios, tree scoring becomes much less reliable, which is a bummer.
Final Thoughts:
I always expect a good time out of these “more stuff”-type expansions, but Woodland Edge definitely surpassed my expectations. The new cards make me appreciate the game more, rather than simply adding variety, and they don’t ruin the balance of the original game.
At the same time, it stops short of being essential—partly because the base game is so robust, and partly because the expansion doesn’t make that significant a change. If you’re getting tired of Forest Shuffle, I can heartily recommend Woodland Edge, but you certainly don’t need it if you only play the game occasionally.
Hits:
• Easy to integrate into the base game
• Creates fun new interactions with previously underused card types
• Doesn’t add too much randomness to the deck
Misses:
• Shrubs are a bit of a missed opportunity
