DESIGNER: Uwe Rosenberg, Tido Lorenz

PUBLISHER: Capstone Games/Feuerland

PLAYERS: 1 -4

AGE: 14 and up

TIME: 60 -120 minutes

Played with a copy I purchased.

It’s time to experience life as a glassmaker in the early 13th century. Take your humble acreage and expand your domain to include more farmland, hire more tradespeople and breed more livestock. If you’ve played a Uwe Rosenberg game before these aims may sound familiar to you; is there more to this game than the usual mechanics? Stay tuned to find out.

There is a two-sided main game board; one side is for solo play and the other side is for 2 to 4 players. The tradespeople tiles are shuffled by type and then randomly placed on matching spaces on the game board.

There are 3 additional side boards that house the buildings, and these are placed off to the side of the main board. Buildings are numbered and are placed on the board accordingly; most are placed on side A but 10 small buildings are randomly flipped over and placed on side B.

 

Each player has their own production tableau with 2 resource wheels; the hands are placed at 8 o’clock to start the game and resource markers are placed on the noted spaces.

If you’ve played Glass Road you’ll be familiar with the production wheel; when you gain or spend resources you move the makers accordingly, Whenever the two darker areas of the wheel have no resource markers on them you immediately turn the dial of the resource wheel until at least one of those spaces isn’t empty.

Each player also has a main estate with fields, ponds, forests, a pasture and a glass hut with a progress tracker.

On your turn you must move your pawn from one village space to another. You can move to a different space in the same village or you can move to another village by paying a provision for every road you use.

Each village space is between two tradespeople. You take the action of one or both of those tradespeople in any order. Some only offer one effect, while others offer you a choice. Some of these rewards will offer you something for what you already have – 1 porridge for every cattle, for example – while others allow you to spend something to gain something else or to build a building of your choice. You also might be able to clear space in your estate so that you have space to build those buildings or some pastures or stables to house your cows and sheep. Hate your choices or don’t have the provision to move to a new village? No problem, because at the start of your turn you can spend one wagon to switch the place of a specific tradesperson with any other tradesperson, immediately improving your options.You can also choose to skip your turn in favor of begging

One of the rewards available to you from the tradespeople is to progress in your glass hut and move your token forward on the track on your main estate. When you get to the top of the track you take a new small estate and add it to your tableau, adding 2 forests and moving your glass marker over to the new track on that small estate. Now you have more forests to remove as well as more space to build buildings.

 

Buildings are key; most of them will score you end game points, but they can also let you get a one time reward, convert resources, or gain a permanent effect.

As the game progresses there will also be jobs on the board; you can choose to move to one of these following the same rules as the usual movement. Most jobs require you to spend something to gain a reward, and you can only move to that if you are able to fulfill the requirements of the job. Once a job is completed a new job is revealed and placed on the board in the location indicated on the job.

The end of the game is triggered when, at the end of a turn, one or both provision markers on the cooking wheel have reached or passed the provisions with an hourglass symbol. You are specifically required to “loudly” announce that the game end has been triggered and all players, including the one who triggered the end of the game, get one more turn.

At the end of the game you score a point for leftover glass, the position of your cooking wheel,, your small estates, your livestock, your buildings and any end game effects printed on your buildings. Most victory points wins; ties are resolved in turn order starting with the person who triggered end games.

MY THOUGHTS ON THE GAME

I have enjoyed my plays of Black Forest quite a bit. I am definitely a fan of Uwe Rosenberg games and this one didn’t disappoint. Is it my favorite Uwe game? Well, no – Feast for Odin is firmly ensconced in that number one spot. Does it have some familiar elements from other Uwe games? Well sure, it does; some of them might seem familiar, but the assemblage of them here with new elements has a very different feel. I definitely do not have the sense that I am playing a rehash of another game; this has new elements and feels fresh. I have heard lots of comments of this being a different version of Glass Road or a game to fix Glass Road; I find it sufficiently different, and I don’t think Glass Road particularly needs fixing. This is a good game on its own.

I think the resource wheel is a very interesting mechanism; the balance of trying to move the wheel to get more glass while also managing your supply of other resources is a challenge. My only complaint is that it can be easy to dislodge a resource disc, so you just have to be very careful that you don’t jostle your wheels.

You really do need to build a few buildings, but other than that you can focus on the path that seems best to you in that game; there does not appear to be one sure path to victory.

Choosing your actions with the dual tradespeople option leads to some interesting choices as well, and I like that you can choose the order in which you do things so you can (hopefully) create some synergies to make your actions as efficient as possible. I have done well collecting all the possible livestock and I have seen others do well with different building strategies. No action in this game feels wasted; everything you do feels important and you do always have at least a couple of choices. In theory it could lead to AP as there are many choices, but in practice that has not been true.

I’ve played the game with 3 players and 2 players and did not feel there was a significant difference, When you want to move to the same village as another player you need to pay them a resource for the privilege, and in the 2 player game there is a neutral pawn moving around that gives it the same feel. There is a solo mode, but I have not yet tried it.

The components are generally well-made and attractive, and it definitely looks like an Uwe game. You do have to do some stickering of all of the resource tokens (I recommend not punching it until you are about to play so you can foist that task off on someone else. . . .) and assemble the wheel, but that’s easy enough to do. Everything looks nice and is generally easy to read; it can be hard to see the buildings if you are not close to them, but I solve that by taking a picture of them at the start of the game so I can review them as needed. I suspect once I am more familiar with the buildings this will be less of an issue. The only potential issue is that some of the boards with the resource wheels do not lie flat and appear to be slightly warped,.

We also had no trouble learning the game from the rules. I prefer to learn by reading, but sometimes the rules are not compatible with that. Here everything was very clear and well-written.

THOUGHTS OF OTHER OPINIONATED GAMERS

Dale – only played solo so far, but I would like to comment that thus far it does NOT appear to be Glass Road v2.0, which is something I’ve heard a lot of other people complain about. Yes, it does share the resource wheels and thus looks similar, but it is not the same game.

[As an aside, I’d also like to take this moment to point out that this game is part of a great selection of games that Capstone Games is distributing in the US this year. If you’re a fan of crunchy games, Black Forest, Stephens, Atlantis Exodus, etc. are all great choices.]

Jonathan – I have only played it once, but found the decision space quite wide and it is hard to plan ahead because of the way the wagon action that moves that one tile moves around. I would frequently come up with two possible moves, as often is the case with planning in worker placement games, only to have the game state change and make neither of them feasible. This led to more downtime than the game seemed to warrant, but that might be a me issue rather than a game issue.

Joe Huber (3 plays) – Dale’s right; it’s not Glass Road v2.0. However, that doesn’t stop players from thinking about Glass Road while playing Black Forest. The production wheel in Glass Road is one of the most clever game design elements I’ve seen, and it’s good to see it again. And those who hate the guess-what-everyone-else-will-pick element of Glass Road will likely appreciate the system in Black Forest more; I actually enjoy that element of Glass Road, but the action selection of Black Forest works perfectly well too.

But on the whole, Black Forest for me is a mix of positives and negatives, with the positives clearly winning out but the negatives putting a ceiling on my level of interest. The ability to swap one action around leads to many interesting possibilities. There is enough variation in the buildings to ensure variety from game to game. In addition, the jobs add some interesting choices, allowing players to rapidly retune their resource holdings. On the other hand, the game takes up a _lot_ of space, and the game can drag. Neither of these are fatal flaws, for me; I’ll still happily play Black Forest. But they are enough to lead me to decide that I don’t need to keep the game in my collection; I’ll play someone else’s copy when I play.

Dan B. (2 plays): The game is definitely interesting, but it does tend to drag on longer than I want. No doubt experienced players could play it faster, but they’d still have to contend with the large (and hard to see) array of buildings; this makes it possible to formulate long-term plans, which will definitely appeal to many people, but that formulation can take a while. I prefer the limited selection available at any time in Glass Road. I also don’t like the way the commodities work – having to spend them frequently even if you don’t care about swapping the tiles, just to make the game end or at least earn more points, is an awkward aspect of the design that should have been developed further.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

I love it:

I like it: Tery N, Joe H.

Neutral: Dan B.

Not for me: Jonathan