Wispwood

• Designer: Reed Ambrose
• Publisher: Czech Games Edition
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30-45 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4qi9zcR
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Is that a light at the end of the… branch?

A curious cat prowls into the forest, lured by flickering lights of all colors dancing through the trees. What are they? Oh, the wisps from the old tales! Each one sparkles with charm and mischief, carrying a unique personality. Can you guide them just right and make your forest the brightest?

Welcome to Wispwood, a magical place populated by glowing wisps. On your turn, choose a wisp tile and a shape to place in your personal grid — your very own growing forest. Each wisp has desires about where it wants to shine, and even the magical trees have preferences! You’ll aim to meet their expectations across three scoring rounds. Between rounds, the forest shifts — fading and expanding — yet the wisps you’ve already placed remain, shaping the possibilities ahead.

With each game, new goal cards redefine the wisps’ whims, ensuring your forest grows in a unique way every time. Enter the forest and explore the magic of Wispwood!

To start, assemble the pond and then shuffle the tree tiles and place one on each of the 8 spaces between the polyominoes on the pond.    Everyone takes a cat token and places it with the active side showing on top of a tree tile in front of them – this is the starting tile of that player’s forest.  The board gets five goal cards, one for trees and one for each of the four types of wisps.  Each goal card has an illustration at the top showing how it scores and a chart at the bottom telling you how many points you get for it. 

Each round, players take turns choosing wisp from the board and then using it to form a polyomino of tiles – choosing from the two shapes printed on the board on either side of the tile that they took.  The other tiles in the polyomino are simply face down tree tiles from the supply.  The wisp must be part of the polyomino, but can be in any position.  To be clear, your wisp is placed wisp side up while all the other tiles in the shape are simply facedown tiles.

The tiles are added to the player’s forest, with at least one tile directly adjacent to a previously placed tile.  The total size of a player’s forest cannot exceed the size limit for the round (4×4 in the first round, 5×5 in the second, and 6×6 in the third).  Note that if you draw a witch wisp, you must be able to place it legally in order to take it.   If your cat is on the active side, you may flip it over and instead use any shape seen on the pond board, not just the two adjacent to the wisp you took. 

The next player now takes their turn.  First, check to see if the wisps need to be reset.  If there are no wisps left on the board, deal out a new set of 8 wisps.  If all the wisps left are of a single type, the active player can choose to discard all of them and deal out a new set of 8 wisps.  Also, if your cat is on the active side, you may flip it over to discard all the remaining wisps and draw a new set of 8. 

Alternatively, if you don’t want to take a tile, you can take a tree turn where you take 1 to 3 facedown tree tiles from the supply and then place them anywhere in your forest display.  You can do this to fill holes in your grid which you could not otherwise fill.   Additionally, when you take this action, you are allowed to flip your cat back to its active side.

The round continues until one player has filled in their entire grid.  Play to the end of the current round so that all players have had the same number of turns in this particular round.  Each player scores their grid.  Each player scores for each of the five goal cards per the chart on the card.  Additionally, a bonus is scored if the player was able to fully complete their grid. 

After scoring, players can move their cat to any tree tile in their grid (or leave it in the same place).  Now, all the trees without a cat on them are returned unrevealed to the supply.  The wisps stay in their locations (and will remain there for the rest of the game).  Their current relative positions will remain in effect for later rounds.  Note that you do not reset your cat if inactive; you can only do this by taking a tree turn.

At the end of three rounds, the player with the highest score wins. Ties broken in favor of the player who finished their grid more times.

My thoughts on the game

Wispwood is a game I first played back in April 2025, and I’d been waiting to get my own copy ever since. I like these tile arrangement puzzles, and this one gets a bit more interesting and complex in the way that you keep you wisps from round to round in their relative positions.  You do get to re-build your grid each round, keeping the total size within the limits for the round, but you do have some latitude in which direction you will grow in.  But, this wisp persistence may actually make you think twice about where you place a wisp in the current round, knowing that you’ll have it in the same relative space for the rest of the game.

The decision on which wisp tile to take is also not always straightforward.  Yes, there are times when both the wisp and the shape match up perfectly for your needs – but more often, you’ll be faced with a dilemma as you’ll only be able to get the ideal wisp or shape out of your choice.  You can always use your cat to improve your options, but then you’ll be out of help until your next tree turn.

Each game plays out a little differently given that you choose new scoring cards for each type of wisp in setup – and then you have to figure out how to maximize the scoring as your progress from round to round. 

As you might expect, the game is mostly a simultaneous solitaire affair, with some indirect interaction with tile choice as well as with the timing of the tile refreshing. For me, it’s definitely my style of puzzle game, and one that I have enjoyed at all player counts, 1 to 4.   Sure, you have a little less control over what tile you might get on your next turn at a higher player count, but again, it’s really only an indirect sort of influence from the other players at the table.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Nate Beeler: This is a cute little puzzle game that I’d like to play again. Everyone I played with at our local con either agreed or had already played it multiple times. I thought the tree tiles disappearing between rounds was a clever mechanism, and I wasn’t sure how to take best advantage of it on my one play. Of note, the art and theme are quite appealing and probably give the game even more space in my head because of it. All that said, it wasn’t so amazing that I’ve rushed out to buy a copy. I’d happily play if someone set it in front of me, though.

Larry:  I’ve played the prototype for this one time.  It was pretty good, with the players having to play Tetris-shaped tiles in order to meet their goals.  It’s shorter and lighter than what I usually expect from CGE and perhaps too abstract to really appeal to me.  Like Nate, I’d be happy to play it again, but it’s not something I’ll be buying.  I rate it at the low end of I Like It.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, Nate Beeler, Larry, Erik Arneson
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link:  https://amzn.to/4qi9zcR