Tree Society

• Designers: Matthew Dunstan, Brett J. Gilbert
• Publisher: Next Move Games
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30-40 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Asmodee NA

Deep in the forest, the Tree Society is a prospering community that wants to expand the neighborhood to welcome newcomers. In the game Tree Society, players are asked to help various guilds follow the blueprints to construct new buildings. Take advantage of other players to sell your resources at the best price, and earn the favor of new guilds by skillfully combining their powers.  Everyone around the table works together to help the Tree Society, but only one can climb to the top and claim victory!

To set the game up, each player gets their own Player board, placing their chest on the appointed area.  Players receive some starting money based on their starting turn order position. Note that players have both an immediate money supply as well as their chest.   Then the Guild cards for the game are set up.  There are 6 separate decks, and you choose 4 to play with in each game.  They are all shuffled together in a large deck, and a market is created: 2 rows of 3 cards. A fruit market is also constructed with 3/4/5 different types of fruits for 4/3/2 players.  The rest of the fruit cards are then shuffled to form the Fruit deck.  Each player draws 3 cards from the Fruit deck and places them on their player board.

On a player turn, the player goes through three phases: Sell Fruit, Build Guild cards, Take Fruit.

The first thing you do on your turn is sell one of your Fruit cards. Slide one of your cards away from your player board, and then count the total number of Fruit cards of this type that are visible amongst the players and the fruit market.  Take coins equal to this number.  Some cards also offer a bonus coin in the upper right of the card.   Note that there is an action icon found on the bottom part of the Fruit card – this represents an action which you can use in the Build phase.

In the Build phase, you can build cards from the supply by paying the Level 1 cost.  Take the card, place it in your Ongoing area and mark the first level with one of your Tree markers. Most cards have different effects based on the level built, and you can only take advantage of the special actions tha you have already built!  If you build from the top row of the supply, note that you must spend an extra coin to do so.  You may also build further levels of cards already in your Ongoing area – simply spend the cost for the next higher level and then move the Tree marker up to the next level.  Once you have built the third level of a card, it is now completed and moved to your Completed section.  You flip the card over and you get a much prettier card that is mostly art with the Level 3 bonus action shown at the top.

Note that you are limited to three cards max in your Ongoing area – though you are allowed to discard a card at any time (obviously losing any special abilities that you may have gained at that point).

In the final phase of a turn, you move your sold Fruit card (flipped over) to your Sold section. Now, take 1 card from the fruit market and place it on your player board. Now refill the fruit market.  Finally, discard all but 2 coins from your immediate supply, and then add all the coins from your chest to your immediate supply.  Finally, refill the Guild cards in the supply, moving cards down if possible and then refilling.  The next player now takes their turn.

The game end is triggered as soon as one player has completed cards with 6 or more hexagons on them combined.  The current round is finished and then one more full round is played.  All players will have the same number of turns at the end of the game.

To score, remove the cards from the market and flip that board over to reveal the scoreboard.  Each guild card is scored (for its current level if Ongoing and its completed level if Completed).  Some cards have a fixed VP level while others have conditional scoring.  Note that coins and Fruit cards left over do not score on their own, but some Guild cards may use them as part of their scoring conditions.  The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player later in turn order.

My thoughts on the game

Tree Society is a challenging game where you try to manipulate the fruit market to get enough money to do the things you need to do on your turn.  The special actions provided by the fruit you sell can also give you a nice advantage if timed correctly.  The timing of your fruit sales is important – you’d like to be closer to the start of a sell off of a fruit type so that your sales generate more revenue.  It will take a bit of luck or some supreme speculation skills to have the right fruits in your hand.

As you generally can only keep 2 coins between rounds, you’ll have to figure out how to generate the money you need each turn – and for particularly expensive plays, it may take a bit of planning to get some coins in your chest (deferred income to the next round) in order to pay for your expenses.

In addition to the action on the fruit card, you can also leverage the special actions found on each level of the Guild card.  There is a bit of a balancing act; the cards with the better powers often have lesser VP payoffs or higher costs to move up each level.  But, if you can chain together a few actions, you’ll be finishing your guild cards in no time!

Be warned, the game starts slowly but will quickly ramp up.  And as the game end is triggered when someone has six hexagons in their completed area – the game end might sneak up on you!  Conceivably (though very unlikely) – this could be with as few as two completed cards.  The costs of the three hex cards can be high, and you’ll likely need the beneficial effects found on smaller guild cards to get you over the hump, so to speak.

Rules – the rules themselves are well designed, though some words are uniformly replaced by icons after their first use – it works great if you catch the first replacement, and it’s great once you’re familiar with the rules – but it did cause me to re-read the rules a few times when learning it when I couldn’t quite remember what an icon stood for.

Components – as you would suspect with a game titled “Tree Society”, the game has tried to limit the amount of plastic.  The bits come in paper bags, and the cards are not wrapped in plastic but are contained by tight narrow paper wrappers.  For the cards and boards, this has has led to some warping of the cards and player boards (maybe the wrappers are too tight?!)  The player boards are also awfully thin, and this uneven surface means the cards laid upon them slide around a bit.  I would have maybe preferred the box space/expense to be used on thicker player boards and not on the chests.  I frankly am not sure the chests are even necessary.  If the places for the sold cards and the chest were swapped out, there would be a natural divider in place to keep the money sources separate, and then maybe my player board wouldn’t be warped…

Despite the component issues (which may not be a widespread issue and only in my copy), the game is a joy to play.  I really like the way that you have to get your fruit sales, fruit actions and guild actions to mesh together.  Every game will be different, in part due to selection of different guild decks in each game and in part due to the random order that the guild cards come out into the market.   Tree Society rewards both good planning as well as timely tactical decisions, and I find this mix to provide a compelling game.  I’m definitely looking forward to playing this one more this fall

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, John P
• Neutral.
• Not for me…