Forest Shuffle

There has been a large swath of nature themed games, so it’s easy for games of this theme to get lost in the sea of new releases. For various reviewers, both The Dice Tower and Shut Up & Sit Down, Forest Shuffle is recommended for its simple yet enjoyable tableau building game. The game has done well enough to have two 36-card expansions that integrate fairly seamlessly, so it has been on my radar to play.

The game is hand management and tableau building at its most elegant. On your turn you either draw two cards, with a hard hand limit of 10, or you play a card from your hand by paying the cost using other cards in hand. The Clearing is a shared discard area for all players, a temporary zone where what you toss out could be plucked up by others, or if you’re lucky maybe even available back to you if it survives till your next turn. The catch is that if at the end of a turn there’s 10 or more cards in the Clearing, then it gets emptied and those cards are removed from the game.

All the cards are multi-purpose, with each tree can hold up to 4 cards orthogonally. All other non-tree cards are dual sided for either the top and bottom half or for a left and right side. Often these halves are pulling you in multiple directions, enticing you to just play the right cards in your forest.

There’s a lot of symbology on these cards: cost, tags, color and bonus sections. But even then it doesn’t really get overwhelming: In fact, as you start to build out you’re looking for cards that will help build out points for what you’ve already played. Or you’re looking for cards with same colors to earn the bonus abilities. Soon you’ll find yourself juggling cards you acquire that you could spend but then they’re also really good if you could play them - oh if only you could just play all of the cards you come across!

I mean, there’s technically no limit to how much you can build out your forest but eventually the deck of cards will run out and you’ll hit the ”Winter is Coming” card that warns you that the game will meet an abrupt end Soon™️. Because once the third Winter card is revealed the game ends immediately. These Winter cards get randomly organized in the lower third of the deck so you get a general sense of the approaching end but reaching it while gauging how many more turns you have left will give that push-your-luck feeling.

I played a simple solo variant called Solo Shuffle, apparently there’s quite a few variants out there on BGG but this one felt the simplest to pilot with a focus on just you taking normal turns and the bot adding or removing cards from the deck and/or clearing. It was easy to get engrossed with playing cards, gathering them, trying to balance between using the clearing as “extra” hand space and risk losing them to the bot.

All in all, I can see how this is such a cozy and enjoyable experience where at the end of the game you can see everything you’ve built out in a beautiful display of nature and art. The mass amount of cards and the variety in how they’re used and scored means each game will have you play differently based on what becomes available to you from the draw pile or Clearing. The expansions add new icons and ways to score without detracting from the fundamental elegance of the game’s play loop. If you’re looking for something with more thinking and interactivity I would suggest Meadow, which is also a nature themed tableau builder of point salad cards with tags and icons but with a much more intricate card acquisition method. And for a simpler game there’s always the aptly named Point Salad.