Living Forest is not a game that I expected to be writing about. It’s a deck-building game, and I hate those, right? I thought I did. I was sure I did. Of course I devoured Dominion when it came out in 2008 with over 100 plays in the months that followed. But I tired of it, and then its immediate progeny were exceedingly dull and derivative. Ascension, pass. Thunderstone, hard pass. Orleans, no thanks. A Few Acres of Snow, ha! Mage Knight, my time is finite. Penny Arcade: The Game, derivation piled on derivation. Nightfall, make it stop! After a few years, I decided to just write-off all deck-building games as a lost cause.
When the couple dozen Opinionated Gamer contributors are planning what to write about, we send around a few emails to discuss the latest games and, of course, our opinions. Most games don’t generate more than a handful of emails. There are just too many games and too little time. Living Forest is not most games. For some strange reason, discussion of Aske Christiansen’s debut game generated piles of emails, mountains of emails, heaps and heaps of emails.
Occasionally, I turn those email threads into an OG Roundtable, like the one about traditional card games or the one about Legends of Andor. Not this time. It all started with a message declaring that the game “surprisingly did not suck.” An auspicious start if ever there was one. Paris and Helen had set sail for Troy, and the die had been cast (to mix my Mediterranean metaphors).
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