Forest Shuffle

This has become the most popular game in our big game-playing family. It's a table game that fits in a fairly small box, which is convenient, and doesn't need a huge space on the table. The cards have beautiful drawings of many trees, animals, butterflies, birds, and even fireflies, which are a pleasure just to look at. You draw cards and combine trees with the other elements in environmentally sophisticated combinations. It's one of those lovely games that are very easy to learn and play, but have many involved strategies to learn as you play more. It's for 1, 2, 3, or 4 players, and three generations of us enjoy it. We're Minnesotans, and we enjoy that the game is European, and all the animals in it have different species names from ours, e.g. we have white-tailed deer, theirs are red door or roe deer, and there are many unfamiliar birds and butterflies. A wonderful new quality game for all of us.

Forest Shuffle occupies a specific and well-executed niche: ecological engine-building at a medium weight, where card interactions are interesting without requiring a rulebook consultation every turn. The placement structure is the clever part — species cards slot into the left, right, top, or bottom positions of tree cards, and since each slot holds one occupant, the spatial arrangement of your forest matters. Scoring emerges from the connections you build across your tableau rather than a single dominant strategy. The biodiversity scoring at the end, where the player with the fewest species in a given category scores nothing, creates consistent incentive to diversify rather than overoptimize one path. Component quality is good and the eco-friendly packaging is the real thing rather than a marketing claim. The BGG community rating consistently places this among the best games in its weight range, and that consensus is accurate. Unusually replayable for a card game, and one of the better designs to come from Lookout’s catalog.

Forest Shuffle is a favorite for our game night group. Its very easy to learn and play, but has a lot of depth. The games play in a reasonable amount of time, and the product itself is good quality.

Forest Shuffle has become one of my favorite games. It's visually appealing and the mechanics are unique and satisfying. There are many paths to victory so in each game you decide what cards you have available to you and what you want to focus on collecting to win making it feel different each time. You play tree cards to your personal forest area. Other cards contain two creatures which will either go on the left or right of your trees or on the top or bottom. When you play your card you choose which creature to play and you tuck your card underneath your tree leaving the chosen creature exposed. So each feels like dual use expanding the variety of cards in the game since each card has two options. To play cards you need to spend other cards in your hand causing some interesting decisions. Do you discard some cards to be able to play your animal and score points knowing your opponent may pick up your discard to help them? Definitely crunchy and thinky decisions. For new gamers it might be a little overwhelming with all of the choices so keep that in mind if you or others you play with get analysis paralysis. The text on the cards may be small, but that hasn't caused any problems for us. This game already has 3 expansions available, so if you get tired of the base game you can breathe new life into it later. The base game is certainly entertaining enough and is inexpensive compared to many games out these days. The box isn't too big, so it's easy to take along on trips. I even spotted a couple playing this on a cafe table in the airport between flights.

This is a GREAT, albeit, THINKY, game! Get ready for some serious analysis paralysis...

A really fun game that's portable as it's not a huge box and doesn't have a million pieces! Bought a a gift for a board game loving adult and he and b his gf really have enjoyed playing it.

This is a really fun and simple game. It is very easy to teach, play and enjoy. The cards have beautiful artwork and fun animal facts. If you like the board game "EARTH", then just imagine a smaller version of that game with a little more simple mechanics. You'll probably like this game. How it is played: Everyone starts with 6 cards. Some cards are trees and other cards are animals. On your turn you have 2 options, draw cards or play a card. If you draw cards you can take them from the top of the deck, the collective discard area "the clearing", or a combination thereof (hand limit of 10). If you decide to play a card, then you must pay its cost by discarding the required amount of other cards. You receive bonus actions if you discard cards that match certain symbols. At least one tree card must be played first because all animal cards are played underneath tree cards. After a tree card s played and any necessary other cards didcarded to pay its cost, then an additional card is revealed from the deck to the clearing as a way to ensure the game progresses. The clearing is cleared if there are ever 10+ cards in it at the end of a players turn. The animal cards are divided in half, either vertically or horizontally with one animal on each half. You then decide which half you are using and tuck it under the tree card accordingly with that side revealed. The placement of each card is quite thematic as well. For instance, birds and butterflies are played under the top part of tree, while frogs, hedgehogs, etc. are placed under the bottom and deer, bear, rabbits, etc. are placed under either side. Each animal card type has a different victory point condition that often requires the presence of another animal or tree. The game ends when the third "Winter" card is pulled from the deck. These winter cards are shuffled into the bottom 1/3 of the deck when the game begins, so you know about when it is coming but not exactly when all three will be revealed. This is a quick game with turns being played so quickly that you have little downtime. The replayability is quite large, because you literally have thousands of combinations when each animal card and tree type is considered. I have played multiple times now with 3 and 4 players, but not yet with 2. I think it will work well with all player counts, but your tablau (the cards played in front of you) is smaller with more players because the deck is exhausted faster... not a big deal, just different scoring totals and some card conditions (like those that require a certain number of unique animals or trees) are harder with more players. I do like this game a lot. I would much rather play EARTH, but when I don't have the time for a longer game or just want a good filler game, then this one is fantastic and fits the same genre and enjoyability. I think most people will enjoy this game. And, as I said earlier, if you like EARTH, then you'll probably like this game.

Really fun game, creative and gives you lots of options of how to play your game with the rest of the people you’re playing with. It makes you think and strategize in a very fun way and what’s also fun about it is you really don’t know who’s going to win until you tally up all the points at the end. I highly recommend this one for board gamers!

The game arrived damaged and appears to be a fake version, completely different from the description and from all the unboxings I watched.

Veio bem embalado em uma caixa, chegou com o aspecto realmente de novo. Jogo original, minha preocupação foi ao ver os comentários falando que colocavam uma etiqueta de papel na frente da caixa do jogo, mas por sorte não veio. Então recomendo esse produto e essa compra. O Jogo é muito bom!

It's a great game, mine was purchased as a return from amazon and the box lid was torn, but it wasn't for a gift so that didn't matter to me (altho I do wish the amazon resale would say /show the issue) It's a game with strategic goals, and the adding up at the end is not for the faint hearted, but it's beautiful artwork and you can play without strategy (but don't expect to win if opponents are strategisers!) The rules seem complicated at first as is often the case with a new game, but once you start playing it's very intuitive and enjoyable

My husband and I are huge board gamers. Our favorites are things like Wingspan, Dominion, and other similar games. We bought this on a whim thinking it might be fun for the occassional pre game warm up and we were pleasantly surprised. We love it and it's become a part of our favorites rotation. It works well as a two player as well as with more (although I'm not a fan of more than four). It is a longer full game as two player, but goes pretty quickly with more players. We like the different options for points and just the general game play. For a card based game it's pretty good and has more of a boardgame feel to it. With the different variations you can use it doesn't get boring too quickly. All in all a great game! I think it would also be suitable for kids and as a family game, although younger kids might not understand all the card pairing advantages they could still play it easily.

Un juego entretenido al principio es algo laborioso pero mientras más le agarras la onda mejoras.