I recently lifted my rating of Forest Shuffle to a 9. It’s now at 40+ plays and it continues to be requested on BGA on a lot of game nights. I’m noting this here because we tried out Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor for the first time recently (my thoughts below) and this iteration is bound to generate yet a ton more play as we tackle all the new card effects it brings to the system.
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New-to-me games played recently include …
ACADEMY, THE (2023): Rank 17332, Rating 6.2
Trick-taker where each player has a different goal which must be satisfied to earn a point. There’s a partnership which must take more tricks than the solo player, while the rebel player needs to win cards in 3 suits. These rotate around and they’re kind of fun as, before each trick, there’s a decision made by the mastermind (effectively) on whether they want one of the 4 game-winning effects in force, or whether to define trumps. The partnership defines the other. But otherwise you’re at the mercy of the cards. And to ram home the randomness, you only win the game if you’ve won three points and then you win the purple 7 in a trick. There’s nothing special about it – it’s just a random card and it’s entirely random if you get the cards to win it. You get the picture.
Rating: 6
APIARY (2023): Rank 312, Rating 7.7
A likeable worker placement game – gather resources, buy effect and income tiles, expand your board to get more tiles out, get special effect cards, convert resources into super resources for big end-game tiles and buy them. All normal stuff. The main feature being that every time someone wants to take an action spot you’re on, your worker is made available for re-use and increases in strength. At max strength it gets to do one super action (choose wisely) before it disappears into the hive for bonuses. Part of the game then is choosing the right moment to buy more workers. As such there’s no tension in the worker placement (but I liked this friendliness!) meaning it’s a game of buying effects and income farms that help you define and then max out a scoring strategy. Which equates to replay despite it being rather vanilla.
Rating: 7
DOM PIERRE (2022): Rank 7008, Rating 6.9
There are 6 actions – get grapes, turn them into wine, sell wine, put out meeples to improve your wine, get goal cards, and a miscellaneous collect helpful stuff action. The interesting thing is that each action gets stronger through the game but you can only do each action 5 times total. It’s tempting to race for stronger actions, but if you dole them out equally you get bonuses. Otherwise it’s fairly straightforward – make and sell lots of wines, preferably high value, and get all 5 goal cards done. Which doesn’t prove to be too hard. There’s no real tension on the action selection – sometimes a goal card or a sell contract disappears that you want but there’ll be another you can do. There are too many iconography checkups required but otherwise turns moved briskly – until actions get stronger near the end anyway. I was engaged but it feels explored already, and next game’s going to be much the same without any significant tension drivers to fuel you.
Rating: 6
FOREST SHUFFLE: DARTMOOR (2025): Rank 7963, Rating 7.9
Completely new set of cards and effects, and now adds in Moors which are horizontal trees with 2 slots above, 2 below, none to left or right. Otherwise, the comment from the original applies exactly the same, being: Your turn is either draw cards (from the deck or the draft) or spend cards to play cards from your hand San Juan style into your personal tableau, finding good scoring combinations and attempting to max them. Standard mechanic, sure, but it’s grown on me with each game – I love that each card comes with two different scoring options, and there are a ton of cards with different scoring combination possibilities. I like the theme, the art, the playing of animals amongst the trees, but the thing I’ve enjoyed most is exploring how many different ways there are to score game-winning points. Once people start building and know what they’re looking for, the game moves along at a tidy clip as well. Nicely done and it’s seeing significant replay as a friendly set collection game.
Rating: 9
GRAND TRUNK JOURNEY (2020): Rank 5275, Rating 7.5
I had higher hopes for this one. It’s another attempt at combining intra-game deck-building with map presence (in the vein of A Few Acres Of Snow and Mythotopia). This is a pick-up-and-deliver cubes version. On your turn you need a city card that takes the cubes you loaded up last turn, move there (at a time cost), unload, and then you need railcar cards that accept the cubes that city offers. At the start of the game with a smaller deck where you know what’s coming next turn you can plan well enough. By the end of the game, turns get longer as trains get more powerful and options widen (especially as most cards give double options, including buying improvements and such) but it’s also more of a lottery whether your next hand will give you a good delivery option. Having dud hands in Dominion isn’t a problem because turns come often and quickly. Here you can wait 10 minutes while everyone works thru their options, do bugger all, and then wait another 10 minutes. I stopped caring for it at about the halfway mark – at which point I felt like I’d explored it already and I was just regurgitating variations of the same turn.
Rating: 6
JURASSIC SNACK (2018): Rank 4617, Rating 6.5 – Cathala
A fun little 2p affair reminiscent of a 5-minute Tally Ho. Move one of your meeples around the board to flip over a tile, activate any effect it has (not all have them), and collect it for points. Some will give you a new meeple. Two of them will turn your meeple into a T-Rex, which anyone can then move to land on and kill an opponent’s meeple. Kill them all, you win, otherwise most points on tiles wins. It’s got similar thinking to Tally Ho – be careful what you move and where in case a bear (ahem, T-Rex) appears. Otherwise, gather, gather, gather. Quick turns, easy to play, surprises, fun.
Rating: 7
MY SHELFIE: THE DICE GAME (2024): Rank 7514, Rating 6.3 – Luciani
A straight-forward roll and write game to cross off squares in your 5×5 grid. The dice correspond to rows – roll 3 pink and you can cross off the 3rd pink square or the 1st (costing 1 die) and the 2nd (costing 2 dice). The 6th dice face is wild. There’s nothing to do outside your turn except to cross off spots on your grid if someone fills a row/column. Meaning it’s a race to fill 3 spots (ie meet the scoring requirement for a row/column) in as many rows/columns as possible before they’re crossed out. Your turn is to be smart with your re-rolls accordingly. I like dice but due to the downtime and the lack of clevers, I’d not be keen to play anymore than 2p.
Rating: 6
TWINKLE TWINKLE (2025): Rank 4524, Rating 7.1
Enjoyable tile drafting game, filling your 4×5 grid with comets, black holes, asteroids, star maps, planets and satellites. They all score in different ways, this next to this, not next to that. You want to join star maps together to get 2 big constellations and as many constellations as you can. It’s a nice choice every turn, trade-offs to be made, and the more leftmost the tile you take, the earlier in turn order you’ll go next round (and you can see the tiles coming) so that’s another consideration. It has easy rules, plays at the right pace, has interesting flip/rotate options to work through, and finishes in a nice length.
Rating: 7
Thoughts of other Opinionated Gamers:
Larry: I’ve played Apiary once and enjoyed it. It plays very fast, but there’s still a reasonable amount to think about. My more experienced opponent spanked me, so there’s clearly some depth. Solid game.
I’m afraid I find Forest Shuffle to be JANTG (Just Another Nature-Themed Game), which, as is often the case with these titles, is based on oodles of possible objectives, making for a loosely designed game where you can’t really optimize things, but you just pick something reasonable and hope for the best. I’m very meh about it and have no real desire to play it again.
I enjoy Grand Trunk Journey more than Alison does. I really like that it tries to do something different with a train game and, largely, succeeds. There is a lot to think about and downtime can be an issue. The fact that my games were with 2 probably is a factor in my positive feelings about it.
Matt C: I played Forest Shuffle and was not impressed. I play with newbies a lot and am thus first-game biased. Some scoring options are much easier to achieve (some of the highest are actually a little luck-dependent) but that isn’t always clear at the start of the game. As far as multiple ways to win, even when players are familiar with the deck it can be hard to make some strategies work. (The primary example – lots of trees in the deck but trying to collect a set for points is pretty difficult to pull off – especially when comparing the scoring on pairs or other sets.) So, I could see this as fun, but only if everyone is just as familiar with the deck – and thus not only trying to complete their own sets but “counter” other players’ attempts to create their own sets.
Tery N: I really enjoy Apiary. We picked it up at our local FLGS because my spouse was sucked in to the ideas of bees in space. I rolled my eyes because I expected very little based on that, but I was very pleasantly surprised at how good the game is. It’s worker placement with resource management and some engine building mixed in, and it does all of it well. You always have something you can do that will benefit you in some way; most action spaces are never blocked, although you may give another player a slight boon by knocking them off. Your action strengths ebb and flow throughout the game, which is an interesting mechanism. There are multiple paths to victory, and the game plays equally at 2 players as it does at 5. I haven’t tried this designer’s other game (Wyrmspan) yet, but am interested based solely on the strength of this design,
