Base price: $28.
2 – 5 players.
Play time: ~60 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 3 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Forest Shuffle Dartmoor was provided by Asmodee US.

I’ve actually been having a pretty good week! I launched a few game hubs for specific types of games to put my genre-based recommendations in one place, and I’m pretty pleased with them. Still debating throwing a Cooperative Games hub or maybe doing one to look back on my favorite games of each year, but that’s a “later Eric” problem. That guy’s a chump. But if you’re interested, I’m particularly pleased with them! I have some on Card Games, the general X-builder genre, Party Games, Puzzle Games, and more. I haven’t tried writing new formats in a while, so it was a fun exercise. But anyways, let’s look at this week’s new game! It’s Forest Shuffle Dartmoor!

In Forest Shuffle Dartmoor, your habitat options have grown! More than just trees and shrubs, you now have access to terrain, which is exciting. Or it would be if it weren’t just a peat bog. You can’t win them all, I suppose, but you’ll still have to work to build the best habitat possible if you’d like to win. So gather your bats and your deer and your weird moles and that rabbit you saw once; it’s time to build a community. Do you have what it takes to bring order to the wilderness?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

Actually, not that much. Place the game board in the center:

Separate out the three Winter Cards; more on those later.

Set the Cave Cards aside, for now.

You’ll need to shuffle up the cards:

Remove a few based on your player count:

• 2 players: 45 cards
• 3 players: 30 cards
• 4 players: 15 cards
• 5 players: Keep all the cards; you’re golden.

After that, do this Pandemic-style. Separate the deck of cards into three roughly-equal piles. Shuffle two Winter Cards into one deck and place the third Winter Card on top of that same deck. Then, place the other two decks on top of that deck. You really want the Winter Cards near the bottom. Everyone then draws six cards.

Shuffle the Caves and place them on the board. Starting with the last player to go and playing in reverse turn order, each player chooses a cave and activates its effect, if relevant. Once you’ve done that, you should be ready to start!

Gameplay

The actual core game loop here is pretty easy! Your goal is to score the most points. Each turn, you can do one of these two things:

• Draw two cards
• Play a card and check the clearing

You can only have 10 cards in your hand, so if you choose to draw two cards and you have nine, you can only draw one more. If you have 10 cards in your hand, you can’t … do this. If you draw a Winter Card, it’s set aside.

To play a card, you have to play it somewhere, usually a Tree or Shrub or Moor. When you do, you choose how to play it, as in which part gets covered (left vs. right or top vs. bottom). Trees and Shrubs let you play one card to each side, and Moors let you play two above and two below (none on the sides). To play any card, you must first add the required number of cards (see the icon) to the clearing. If you played a Tree, you also flip the top card of the deck into the clearing, setting it aside if it’s a Winter Card.

See? You’ve mostly got it. Last thing is that some cards have a bonus ability, indicated by an icon of a certain shape and color. To activate it when it’s played, all cards you spend to the clearing must have that same icon on them somewhere.

After doing this, if there are 10 or more cards in the clearing, discard them all. That’s pretty much it!

Play continues until one player draws and sets aside the third Winter Card (or it’s revealed through other means). As soon as that happens, the game immediately ends! Tally up your points and the player with the most points wins!

Player Count Differences

I’ve tried Forest Shuffle at a few player counts, and with Dartmoor I kind of lock in at two players. For me, a lot of the game is based around finding particular synergies that work and leaning into them and building off of them. WIth one opponent, I can mostly focus on that but stay flexible if they start taking stuff I want. With four, well, that’s a lot of turns between two of mine, and I can’t necessarily expect that I’ll be able to get what I want without drawing it from the deck. That ends up making that aspect of the game lean a bit more on luck, which isn’t necessarily what I’m going for. I’m aware that with more players, likely, those players will be discarding cards to the center as well, but the center discards out of play with 10+ cards, so, I may not even get to use those cards, even if I did want them. Not a huge surprise, though: in general, I tend to prefer games where I’m free to strategize and synergize without other players bothering me too much. My recommendation is for two, but if you enjoy higher-chaos games, try playing with more folks!

Strategy

• This is a real “go all-in on your synergies” game. The better your core synergy is and the more cards you can feed it, the better you’ll do. Some cards score for each card of a certain type, so playing other cards that let you draw new cards when that type is played is a clear winner. You can then play cards to get cards to score cards and keep running that train to 300+ points.
• Try to avoid running out of cards, as they are your primary currency in the game as well. I usually try to hit the hand limit pretty consistently and then play cards once I near 10, though it takes some time to refill. I recommend that, unless you’re on a roll (or are playing cards that let you draw more cards).
• Plenty of cards want you to have more moors, so … it’s never the worst idea, if you can. Some cards let you discard a card from your hand to create a Universal Moor, which is also pretty handy, but the other moors have particular scoring options that are worth playing occasionally.
• Don’t waste card plays! It’s almost always better to get the bonus effect when you play a card. The bonus effects are almost always beneficial, to some degree, so if you think you can make one happen, try to do your best to do so. There may be some reasons not to (you don’t want to give up a critical card and that’s your only card of that type), but in the general case I’d recommend trying to optimize for bonuses when you can.
• Unless you have specific cards that contradict this, it’s almost always better to have some empty spots in your play area. You really want to not be blocked so that you can always play a card if you want; if you have no empty spots then you’re stuck waiting for a tree or a shrub or something. They come up pretty quickly and regularly, but it’s still a bit of wasted time in a game that is largely an efficiency puzzle.
• Knowing what your opponents are doing can be helpful, just to make sure you’re not falling behind. Keep an eye on what they’re taking and what they’re playing! Some synergies are pretty easy to spot, like if they keep taking cards that reward them for playing birds (or something similar). I wouldn’t necessarily take birds to keep them away from them, but you may find other ways to junk up their process (such as taking birds and then using the other side of the card).
• Certain cards (bats and rabbits) can be easily played as a result of other cards; worth keeping in mind. I think there’s a gnat or a lake fly that lets you play a bunch of bats, for instance, and rabbits let you play more rabbits, so if you store up a bunch in your hand you can drop them all at once for a huge scoring turn, especially if you’ve been doing other stuff on your previous turns anyways.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• You know what? There aren’t enough games with bogs. I think that’s fun! Give me a bog or a swamp or a marsh; I can’t remember the last one I played other than Kingdom Builder: Marshlands.
• I like the collection of animals in this game; it’s eclectic. They’re not my favorite animals, save for the bats, but I do appreciate how uncommon some of these animals are relative to the very common animals. It’s pleasant.
• The high-synergy play is very rewarding if you know what you’re doing. You can get some very exciting combos going where you play cards and draw cards and then get a ton of points as you play a card that relies on a card that relies on a card. If you can get the various synergies working, turn-to-turn play is extremely satisfying.
• The card art is very nice. It’s intricate and visually striking! A lot of green, don’t get me wrong, but there’s some other colors at play as well. The cards look great.
• It’s all cards, also, which is good for portability. You can honestly skip the board if you need. If you do, the game is literally just cards. Still a big footprint, given all the forests and such, but just cards.
• The caves are nice for some mild variable setup. Starting player powers are usually nice, just to make sure that there’s a bit of an offset between everyone.
• I like the multi-use cards, generally; I think they’re fun. It’s great from a printing standpoint, since you get more bang for your buck, but I also just like the flexibility that multi-use cards afford. They let you, the player, decide what and when you need and you can occasionally pivot if you need to.

Mehs

• I actually don’t have an issue with the sudden end of the game (drawing the third Winter card), but it might surprise players if they’re not expecting it. Be clear about that when you’re teaching the game. Some people get caught off-guard if the game suddenly and abruptly ends when they’re planning a whole big set of moves. I feel their pain but I must dutifully note that the game does give you clear signals that it’s coming, especially after the second Winter Card; you should be prepared for the game to end at any time. I recommend communicating this with players to make it clear.

Cons

• As with most high-synergy games, I find that you benefit a lot more if you already know the general types of cards available, so you’ll see experienced players usually having an easier time than new players. If you don’t know there are cards that advantage drawing and playing certain types (like, for instance, there’s a clear multi-card synergy around bats), you might go for something that doesn’t land nearly as well. Trying to play this with no synergies is … wasteful. So take some time with the cards before you play or show some examples to new players! Help them out!
• Scoring is a mess. I do miss the automatic scoring of Board Game Arena; I’ll be honest with you. Here, it’s probably easiest if you go habitat-by-habitat, but so many have dependencies and those dependencies influence how other cards might score and some cards compare your habitat to other players’ and it’s just a lot of moving parts all at once. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the game, there’s just no better way to do this. Good luck.

Overall: 8 / 10

Overall, I think Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor is a lot of fun! Thematically, I’m kind of neutral on it. I love the bogs, but I wish we had leaned a bit more into the bogs and less into the general idea of sheep or moles or whatever. It does make you wonder how a fantasy Forest Shuffle would play. I’m also just preemptively stressed every time I play, as scoring takes a while and has a lot of Having played the first one, I do appreciate that they’ve decreased the number of icon types so it’s easier to get matches. I like being able to play a bunch of combo-friendly moves, and having fewer icon types does make it a lot easier to activate each card’s bonus effects. I think Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor also finds itself leaning more towards being a Strategy Game than a Casual Game, but that’s more to do with the cognitive load of, you know, figuring out all the cards and the synergies. The actual core gameplay loop is pretty easy. You draw cards or play cards, and you can play them around trees or in bogs. Just like real life, sometimes throwing a card into a bog is good. They don’t grant wishes, sadly. As it compares to more engine-building games, I don’t think it’s quite as bad for new players, but there are still definitely benefits to knowing all the cards. It is a fun successor in the Forest Shuffle line, however, and I’m interested to see what new games come from the folks at Lookout, since it does seem like both they enjoy making it and it seems to do pretty well. If you’re interested in a high-variability game of combos and synergy, you enjoy building a tableau, or you just want “moor” Forest Shuffle, Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor might be just what you’re looking for!

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