Storyfold: Wildwoods

• Designer: Sjoerd van der Linde
• Publisher: Open Owl Games
• Players: 1 (well, we play with 2)
• Age: 13+
• Time:  30-60 mins
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4bJevlP
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Storyfold: Wildwoods is an innovative solo & narrative adventure board game with beautiful art and an immersive story campaign.  Storyfold: Wildwoods is a narrative adventure game in which you play as a young girl named Luma, and her bear companion, Brom, as they set out to heal the forest from a dark and mysterious shadow.

In Storyfold: Wildwoods, you will use the innovative Storybook with its built in dashboard to progress in a replayable campaign. Each session of Wildwoods is a single scene, with multiple scenes forming a chapter. The choices you make will impact Luma’s journey across the chapters as she confronts her fears.

To begin, the Storybook is opened up on the table.  As the book is opened, the panels will unfold out onto the play area.  Find the deck of cards for where you are in the game, starting with the Prologue cards… and begin the game by reading the first numbered card.  The top page of the book gives you the story for the particular scenario while the bottom page has an illustration/map of the scene as well as a couple of action areas.  

The unfurled panels of the Storybook create the Dashboard. These panels are normally folded at the current scene. The four decks of cards are all placed in their respective places (Chapter cards, Shadow Cards, Explore Cards and Creature cards). The faceup cards on top of the Chapter deck are placed in their respective spaces. 

The Luma and Brom cards start on the Dashboard and the Boon cards placed below the Boon spaces. The 4 Action cards (Explore, Light, Help, Heal) are placed in their corresponding spaces in the River. 

The game is played in a series of rounds. Each round consists of two phases; the Luma phase and the Shadow phase. 

The first phase of the Luma phase is taking all the Dice back from the Used Dice space. Then comes the Action phase – the player first chooses an Action card from the river.  The location of the card in the river determines what values on the dice rolls are needed for success. The leftmost spot in the river means 3+ are successes while the rightmost needs 6+. Regardless of where the action card starts in the river, once it is used, it moves to the right end of the river.  The four actions will be available in the game:

• Explore – resolve an Explore location on the map or gain Explore cards
• Light – allows you to stun creatures in the river or to advance the light track  (in most scenes, you have to get to the middle of the track to be able to explore the final explore space)
• Heal – allows you to fight creature in the river or to gain Spirit
• Help – used at Help locations or the gain Crystals (which can be placed on cards to count as a die success)

Once an Action card has been chosen, any number of available dice may be rolled. The player then counts successes and spends Crystals to gain more successes. The Actions ability is then resolved. The used dice are then returned to the Used Dice space and the Action card is then moved to the end of the River.  You can keep taking actions until you run out of dice or until you voluntarily stop the Luma phase.

The Shadow phase then begins. The first step is to activate creatures in the River from left to right. When activated, the player loses Spirit equal to the amount shown on the creature card. If the creature is stunned, the player simply removes the Stun token instead (and takes no Spirit Damage).  After attacking, the Creature card will instruct you on where to place it in the river.  The second step is to advance the Shadow marker. To do this the player simply moves the Shadow marker 1 space to the left and then resolve any Shadow Effect icons on that space. 

You continue playing turns until you either meet the win condition of the scenario or you are overtaken by the Shadows (because either the Shadow deck is exhausted or the Shadow marker makes it to the middle of the track).  In either event, you’ll be directed to a new page in the book to continue your adventure.  Thus, the story has the possibility to branch off at almost any point, and each time you play the game, you’ll likely encounter a different way through the book.   

The game has a prologue (which is really just there to teach you the rules) and then five chapters of the story. As the story unfolds, you’ll see Luma and Brom travel on a quest in the forest to heal it, as darkness and shadows start to set in and ruin the beauty. Thankfully, Luma and Brom have each other and the power of light to help them save the forest and restore its natural state.

As you get through each chapter, the game then allows you to either save your current progress or to continue on.  The save process is quite nicely designed with the flaps folding into the book to mark your place and the trays in the box arranged nicely to hold all the bits you need.  

My thoughts on the game

Storyfold: Wildwoods is a super interesting solo game with a really fascinating action system.  I love the way that the player has to manage the four action cards – as you wait on an action, it will move to the left of the river meaning that you will have an easier chance for success.  You’ll have to weigh the plusses and minuses of when to take the particular actions.  You’ll also need to manage how you want to use the dice each round – as you have a fixed supply of dice,  If you really want to ensure success, you might choose to roll more dice on a specific action, but this will cost you in terms of probably taking fewer total actions that round.  As the Shadows attack/advance in their phase each turn, you do want to try to take as many actions as you can in the Luma phase.

The game does a nice job of giving you reasons to take all the different actions.  You will always have to explore – this is how you visit the spots on the map to get through the page.  You can also use this action to get cards from the Explore deck which can be quite beneficial.  Healing is a good way to remove monsters from the River but also to keep your Spirit levels up.  Light is a useful way to stun a creature so that it does not deal damage in the current round.  In most maps, you also need to get Light successes in order to move the Light marker to the middle of the track in order to access the final Explore space.  Help is good for Crystals (essentially saving success for later use) or for Help locations on the map – these often give you benefits necessary to pass through other areas on the map.  But, as you can see, you’ll often have multiple good options at the leftmost part of the river; and it’s up to you to plan the order of the actions and the number of dice you want to use at each trial.

You do have to solve things fairly quickly as the dual timers of the Shadow deck and the Shadow marker on the light meter keep light but constant pressure on you.  If you take the super safe route and roll lots of dice for each action attempt, these timers will surely catch up with you.

The story unfolds neatly with each step into the book.  You get a bit more of the story with each pageflip, and I feel like it is well done.  As I’ve only made one pass through the book so far, I can’t say too much about how varied the story can get, but it feels like most of the main storypoints will be the same (and encountered) on each pass through.  The way the story branches is based on the outcome of each page in the book. If you succeed, you’ll turn to page A.  If you fail, you might have to start the page over again or maybe you’ll branch off and go to page B, etc.

That being said, I think that the game will still be replayable. Sure, you’ll only get the big surprise/reveal of the story on the first play, but you can still enjoy the puzzle of getting through each page in the book.  I would say that this feels a lot to me like the Andor games.  In those games, you also get surprised the first time you play a scenario, but that hasn’t stopped me from going back and solving the puzzle again later.

Additionally, there are cards in the box that you can add to the game to make it more difficult – so even though you might know the story and what particular map pages want you to do, you can make it harder to do it…  I’ll be honest though, I don’t think the game needs to be any harder – if anything, I would say that it is more than hard enough as it is.  

So this is one of those interesting games that doesn’t really have a rulebook – it just starts you playing and teaches you along the way in the Prologue part of the game.  It was a really natural way to learn the game as you pretty much found out how to do things as you needed to learn them, and it also essentially nudged you through a successful first adventure.

All of the rules were communicated to you as you flipped through the cards of the Prologue.  The downside for me is that it’s super hard to know where to look when you can’t remember the rules!  For me, we played a lot when we first got it, and then put it aside for about six weeks (due to real life and vacations intruding) – to remind myself of all the rules, I did look through the rulebook and then flipped through the cards for the Prologue.  Not quite as easy, but manageable.

The art and storytelling here is great; though I expected this after playing an earlier Open Owl game, Mythwind. This has been a great game to experience at my own speed. And FWIW, I have really only played this game with 2p.  My wife and I have been exploring the forest together in a dual-decision-making sense.  We just talk through our choices and come up with our plan.   It’s actually been fun with each page flip to be able to have someone to talk through the initial plan once you see what’s on the map.  

Storyfold: Wildwoods has been a great game to play through on cold winter nights here, and it’s a game that I’ll likely put on the shelf for a few months (to try to “forget” the story) and then play through again.  I also feel that the whole Storyfold system is unique and well-done, and I hope that further adventures are created using this same system.  For anyone looking for a new solo game (or couples-solo), this is most heartily recommended.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

I love it! Dale Y

I like it.

Neutral.

Not for me…

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