Imagine a world where your aimless wanderings are rewarded. Where the adventures opens unexpected roads of discovery. As you visit the villages within the Black Forest region, you'll encounter different tradespeople, ready to offer their services. From butchering for your animals, to lumberjacks ready to clear your forests.
Designed by board gaming legend Uwe Rosenberg along with Tido Lorenzo, Black Forest is a wonderful game set in the heart of Germany. Featuring classic Euro mechanisms, all the “Uwe” signatures are here: wooden pig and cow, a vast array of tile choices, and of course worker placement thrown in the mix too.
Imagine a world where your aimless wanderings are rewarded. Where the adventures opens unexpected roads of discovery. As you visit the villages within the Black Forest region, you'll encounter different tradespeople, ready to offer their services. From butchering for your animals, to lumberjacks ready to clear your forests.
Designed by board gaming legend Uwe Rosenberg along with Tido Lorenzo, Black Forest is a wonderful game set in the heart of Germany. Featuring classic Euro mechanisms, all the “Uwe” signatures are here: wooden pig and cow, a vast array of tile choices, and of course worker placement thrown in the mix too.
Released by Feuerland Spiele, Uwe Rosenberg’s own publishing label he has many titles within his remit. The most popular and well known is of course Ark Nova and the new Sanctuary designed by Mattias Wiggle. Black Forest joins his long linage of games like Caverna and Agricola to name a few.
As you start with a humble estate, you’ll begin to expand into the forest and your glass production too! With a few fields, ponds, and forests to your name, you’ll travel from village to village, meeting locals on your journey to victory. As you expand your estate, you’ll gain points for cattle and pigs, small and large buildings, and of course, the position of your cooking wheel dial.
Dials of Destiny
Those wheels are central to Black Forest’s gameplay. Originally seen in his 2013 hit Glass Road, they are resurrected once more. There are two separate dials which produce both refined and common resources throughout the game.
The dial on the left is your glass-making wheel. This is where the typical ingredients of water, sand, wood, and charcoal are used to produce glass. The right most dial is where you produce food (what the game calls provisions) and commodities to travel between villages.
The dials work like this: When you move a resource around the wheel, like wood or charcoal, you leave a space for the resource wheel to tick forward. Then, just like a clock, those hands move, consuming those resources to produce those valuable, refined ones. The wheels are the main puzzle and driving force of the game, unlike other icon-based engine builders. Through automatic creation of provisions and glass, it truly is a fascinating puzzle.
Outside of the resource wheels, you’ll be taking turns placing out your workers. Each worker has the option to visit one or two tradespeople at a time. These tradespeople are how you gain resources, clear space on your estates, and build buildings. The villagers are semi-randomised at the start of each game. This keeps each game fresh and each playthrough having new strategies to work out.
Architecture of Choice
Black Forest is a wonderful game of endless possibilities. Take, for example, the 36 double-sided small buildings. Each game, 10 are flipped to their alternative side B, meaning the game has over 250 million different combinations. While this might seem overwhelming, each game has its own distinct feel. This, along with the randomised tradespeople and the various large buildings, means no two games will ever be the same. This variety makes Black Forest such a joy of a sandbox to explore.
Buildings have various costs associated with them; usually, bricks and wood are required. Each building is tiered, with large buildings taking up two spaces on your domain and costing the highest value of three glass to construct.
With numerous buildings, it can be hard to determine a strategy for the next few moves. However, on the building boards, they are sorted by specific categories. For example, if you desire to go a forestry route, there are buildings to help that strategy. Later on, you might be looking for end-game scoring; either the large buildings or even some small ones might just be the right thing.
Take the Potash Manufacturer building for example. Arguably one of the strongest buildings no matter your overall plan. It allows you to remove the additional charcoal in your glass-making wheel. This makes producing glass just that little bit quicker and regular.
The large building again offers vast options, with a large stack coming in three separate tiers. Tier 1 buildings give slightly less points but are the easiest to build. Tier 2 are the smallest stack shuffled in, providing a health clean 10 points. Tier 3 are the most expensive resource investments. They give a plethora of points both for the buildings and end-game scoring.
A Forest of Opportunity
Everything in Black Forest makes it feel like a vast canvas to tinker and tweak each game. The dials provide one of the most interesting resource management mechanics I have seen. It is less of an engine-building Euro and more of a strategy puzzle. If the game were to come to an online version, then who knows which buildings will be in favour and which won’t? But for hobbyists, I would recommend Black Forest. It’s heavy enough but light enough not to take up precious hours of your life. The opportunity to take two turns per action helps the game skip along nicely. And as other players take their turns, you can be planning your next move.
The job too offers a nice mid-game boost to your resources. Not only do they add variety, but if you have an ample amount of a certain resource, you can spend it to gain some others in return. Finally, the building types from one-off abilities to permanent conversions are nice to have. This means you can skip or get better value than tradespeople. Some even have nice bonuses for certain actions.
As the board is laid out with the three separate boards, each with housing their own building ready for display and perusing, this game is by no means small. In fact, many complain, and I agree, of the size it takes up on the table. Like other games in the Feuerland Spiele lineup this game is more mechanics over beauty. However, it is the classic grey or brown affair, but with a welcoming green of calm and new possibilities. Once on the table, the game looks impressive compared to your tiny estate.
I wish perhaps the board was a little smaller, and the individual estates enlarged slightly, as they feel secondary to the other components. However, I understand the need to have all the buildings displayed and laid out as clearly as they are, which is certainly a bonus.
Another issue is the actual boards the dials work upon. Having used double-depth cardboard, most of the finished boxes contained warped or bent boards. My own boards, for example, are all permanently arched, despite my best efforts to flatten them. They also, as I mentioned, could be larger because trying to fit three tokens on one quadrant of the dials is quite the task!
However, despite these issues, the iconography is clear and well formatted. And despite the number of buildings, the game is fairly easy to set up and tear down, with plenty of bags to store components in.
Finals Thoughts
In my own playthroughs of this game, I have experienced the competitive nature of even solo play. Where trying to beat my first game’s original score has been hard to do! I think this was more due to me “illegally” building structures despite not being at the appropriate villager to do so! Even at two players with movable pawns, games are still fun and offer a lower scoring but more interactive experience. If in a solo game you get a score of 40 or below, then that might seem like a bad game. But in competitive games, a score of 40 or above would be considered exemplary!
I think games are best at that three-player mark for this game. With just enough nuisance from other players but not so frustrating that you don’t want to try again. This game is for seasoned players, less nasty than Agricola and easier than A Feast for Odin. It is more complex than Everdell and Flamecraft, as mechanically sound as Wingspan and enduring as Ark Nova too.
Black Forest may not be the prettiest or most popular game. But for me, it is one I will keep coming back to. The heartwarming feel of the theming and gameboard. The magnificent buildings, and the sandbox nature make it one of the finest worker placements Uwe has gifted us.
