Compact and pretty 1–4 player Reforest: Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast and sequel (standalone expansion) Reforest: Old Growth are practically the same game. The second does add a few extra features, but the overall gameplay is identical, so I can cover both here.
According to the rulebook, you ‘Compete to grow the healthiest forest ecosystem by arranging and evolving a synergistic collection of plant cards.’ What this translates to is playing plant cards from your hand to populate a triangular 6-space tableau area termed the ‘forest,’ maximising your score from points on played cards and points based on the arrangement or types of plants in your forest.
In this game, your forest has two kinds of height dimension, the ‘elevation’ (i.e., along the table away from players) and with cards being played in stacks of one atop another. To avoid confusion, I’ll always use the words ‘above’ and ‘below’ to indicate relative elevation and ‘on top of’ and ‘underneath’ for stacks of cards.
Card Anatomy
Note: some of the pictures in this article, such as the one above. have been taken from the Print and Play demo deck freely available for download from the publisher, Firestarter Games as they’re clearer than my amateurish photography!
Plant cards have a ‘nutrient’ cost in the top left corner, the number of other cards to discard from your hand and/or ‘stored energy’ (more on that later) to spend in order to play them—Chocolate Lily in the image above costs 1, and the others cost 2.
Below that is an indication of where in the forest the plant can grow, the viable ‘elevations’—Chocolate Lily can grow at any elevation, indicated by all 3 layers of the mountain icon being filled in, while Black Gooseberry can be planted only in the upper 2 layers and Osoberry only the lower 2.
Continuing down the left side, next is shade tolerance: Chocolate Lily, with its fully white sun, cannot thrive in shade, and will become stored energy if covered by another plant, while the others can grow in shade. On the topic of stored energy, some of the plant cards in Old Growth will let you convert visitors (animals—see later) to stored energy (that conjures up images of partly eaten and decaying bunny rabbits on the forest floor, circle of life and all that, yummy…), which are worth 3 units each, rather than 1, and if you spend those, you don’t get any change if there’s an excess! Old Growth also introduces a third type of plant, parasitic ones which thrive only in shade, indicated by a fully black sun icon on the card; these are played underneath other cards.
Finally in that section of the card is the plant height; a card can only be added on top of a stack if it’s taller than the current top-of-stack card.
The top right of the card displays a final score contribution, repeated on the bottom right. Also along the bottom of the card is a row of traits, termed the ‘understory overview’ which only makes partial sense: the understorey (to give it it’s correct spelling over here) comprises those layers of plant life beneath the forest canopy, and this line is all that’s visible of shade-tolerant plants in your stacks of cards; however, it’s also visible for the topmost (i.e., canopy) card too. The understorey icons participate in set collecting and action triggering. Parasitic plants have an additional icon at the left of the understorey (mycelia, perhaps, or roots—I’m not sure) and the row has a grey background. Old growth plants, another feature of Old Growth (the clue’s in the name), have a tree ring icon on this row and a green background.
Another very important feature of the card is the plant effect text, just above the understorey summary and flavour text, with different types indicated by different background colours:
· (white background to the text) trigger when the card is played, e.g., Chocolate Lily lets you take cards from the draw space which have specific traits and play them as stored energy;
· (green background) provide on-going effects as long as the card isn’t covered, e.g., Osoberry lets you peak at the top card of the face down deck at any time;
· (pink) react to other cards being played, e.g., placing a card with a particular trait adjacent to this one allows you to draw a card;
· (blue) act during gathering, e.g., before gathering, peek at the top cards of the deck;
· (brown) trigger when covered, e.g., if covered by a tree, add cards from the discard pile to the stored energy to this stack; or
· (yellow) provide a scoring bonus, e.g., Black Gooseberry will give you an extra point for every plant in its stack showing the fruiting trait (including itself).
Visitors provide an end game score bonus, appearing at the top and bottom right of the card. These are won by having the most of whatever is specified in the Multiplayer text below the gorgeous picture; or if you’re playing the solo game, if—and only if—you achieve the specific goal in the Solitaire line, which contains a sequence of 3 increasing numbers, specifying a different target for each of the 3 rounds of the game. For example, Black Gooseberry and Osoberry could contribute to American Black Bear’ goal, as long as their understorey summaries are visible in your forest.
[PICTURE Reforest 2 Terrain.jpg]
Old Growth introduces Terrain, an optional set of per-player benefits, very similar to plant effects. At the start of the game, players can place a terrain card alongside the different elevations of their currently empty forest, with the intention of scoring the chosen terrain for that row. For example, the pair shown in this picture will make some plants with the specified trait cheaper to play or provide a score boost for particular plant traits.
Event cards, another optional module, will cause something (usually catastrophic) to occur between rounds. The picture above shows Flooding, which will destroy all plants with no water tolerance, but also lets you draw cards based on which wet soil tolerant plants you do have; while Lightning kills your biggest tree, but can give you an additional visitor drawn from the deck (essentially, more scoring points without having to fulfil the visitor’s requirement).
Note that the event cards are double-sided, making it a slight nuisance to shuffle all possible events. It would have been more convenient to have twice the number of single-sided cards.
Setup
Shuffle the plant cards and create a deck depending on the player count: for 4 players, 90 cards; 3 players, 70; 2 players, 50; and 30 cards for solo play. Note that for solo play, you should make sure there are no more than 6 old growth plants in the final deck.
Deal 5 cards to each player as their starting hand, and reveal 3 plants to form the ‘nursery’—a shared market—to the right of the face down draw deck. Leave space for a discard pile to the left of the deck.
Shuffle the visitor deck, placing it face down above the plant deck, and reveal 3 visitors to its right. Tuck a player count specific number of plant cards below the first and second visitors: 12 for 4 players, 10 for 3, 8 for 2, and 6 for solo. (These will be added back into the deck at the end of the first and second rounds.)
If you’re using the events module, shuffle the event cards and use them in one of two ways:
· Standard mode—place one event card randomly alongside the first 2 visitor cards; or
· Casual mode—place the events deck nearby, such that a random card can be drawn at the end of the appropriate rounds.
Aside: I’m not sure why the second is called ‘casual’—it seems to me that being able to see the upcoming event ahead of time allows you to plan for it rather than suffering the stress of a random catastrophe!
If you’re using Old Growth’s terrain module, deal each player 3 terrain cards randomly. Players can choose to keep any or all of them, perhaps based on the cards in their hand and what’s in the nursery, placing them to the left of where specific rows of their forest will go. (A playmat would be a useful addition to the game, clarifying the alignment of terrain cards with the as yet invisible forest, though it does mean you’d have to commit to exactly where the first tree is in your forest—see the turn examples section later for what I mean.) If a player discards terrain cards, they can draw the same number of plant cards from the deck.
Now you’re ready to play.
Turn Structure
You’re aiming to create a forest like the one shown above. Note that you don’t have to populate all the spaces in your forest, but you’ll almost certainly score more points if you do.
On your turn, you can either gather plants (i.e., take up to 2 cards from the nursery and/or deck) or play a plant from your hand into your forest, which can trigger several side-effects. In solo mode, when gathering, you also discard an additional card from either the nursery or deck.
If the plant deck becomes empty when drawing cards (whether because of gathering or plant card effects), the game pauses, mid-turn if necessary, until end of round processing has taken place (see later), and then the game resumes exactly from where it left off. (It may be worth having a scrap of paper to hand to note whose turn was interrupted and where within a turn they were, since it’s all too easy to forget those details after the distraction of dealing with the round end!)
The first card you play must be placed at the lowest elevation in your forest, and subsequent ones must be adjacent to (including on top of, or in the case of parasitic plants, within) played stacks, i.e., those that share a border. It is important for some card effects to be aware that adjacency also includes other cards in a stack.
You must pay the played card’s cost by discarding the appropriate number of cards from your hand; each discarded card is worth a single unit of the nutrient cost, regardless of whatever numbers appear anywhere on the card. However, you can use stored energy adjacent to the space in lieu, by discarding those cards as necessary. Additionally, if you play a card on top of another, you can discount the cost by that of the card being covered, the so-called succession discount. Finally, actions revealed on other plants in your forest may also have a cost effect.
Remember to take the elevation constraints of the played card into account, and that you can only play a card on top of another if it’s taller. Note that parasitic plants (from Old Growth) are played underneath played cards, but the height constraint still applies, as does a new requirement for matching trait icons. There is a limit of one parasitic plant and one old growth plant per stack.
Any relevant plant effects are triggered as appropriate, e.g., letting you draw more cards or providing a discount, but be aware that plants can’t trigger their own reaction effects. One of the new actions provided by old growth trees is regeneration, letting you flip a stored energy plant (definitely not a visitor!) card back into a growing one, even if the plant is shade-intolerant. The rationale for this is that these giants of the forest can create habitats for further growth, such as spaces within their aboveground root network. Note that the regenerated plant has to conform to elevation and height rules, though you are permitted to have multiple plants of the same height in this special case; if there’s a height tie, the regenerated one goes below the already visible one. These conflicts can happen because it’s possible that an earlier action of placing plants from the deck into stored energy has caused the ‘wrong’ plants to be found within a stack.
When adding to the top of an existing stack, if the newly covered card is one which doesn’t thrive in shade, it is flipped over, becoming the stored energy mentioned earlier. If the card is shade-tolerant, it’s left face up, but with only the understorey at the bottom showing, meaning the covered plant’s traits can contribute towards other cards’ actions and bonuses, and the card’s score is counted at the end.
Finally, whether you gather or plant, you will have to discard down to 7 cards in your hand at the end of the turn. Play then passes to the next person, and this continues until the draw deck has been emptied for the third time.
Turn Examples
The right half of the partial forest image above shows the result of two turns after the left side.
I’ve played Canada Thistle on top of Self-Heal; the new plant is taller, and can be played at the correct elevation. The cost was 1 card from my hand, since the covered card provides a discount of 1. The covered card is shade-intolerant, so is flipped to form stored energy. Additionally, all players had to discard or draw to 4 cards because of Canada Thistle’s when-played effect. This was possibly a rather rash card to play, given the difference in height between covered and covering cards, and I’d have been better picking something closer, as is the case with the second turn.
I played Trailing Blackberry on Twinflower, at zero cost because of the succession discount of the covered card. Because Twinflower is shade-tolerant, it remains face up. Sadly, I couldn’t exploit Twinflower’s when-covered effect because Trailing Blackberry doesn’t have a when-played effect.
At this point, I had the cards above in my hand. What should I play next? Definitely not the trees, since their heights would totally compromise my ability to play anything else on top of the stacks containing them—tall trees are definitely late-game cards. I could put Devil’s Club on top of Canada Thistle solely for its when-played ability, hoping to get better cards than my fistful of trees, though that is ‘wasting’ some of the covered card’s succession discount (covering a cost 3 card with a 2 cost one), and will convert Canada Thistle into stored energy. Alternatively, I could place Sweet Gale in the final slot at the lowest elevation (which could just as well be defined as to the left or right, since I haven’t committed yet—as far as I can tell from the rulebook, this flexibility is permitted), though that’s priming the stack with a high initial plant. However, I might be able to benefit from its passive ability, especially with Devil’s Club in my hand. Additionally, the visitor goals for the current and successive rounds might indicate which traits I should strive to keep visible by not converting some plants into stored energy.
As you can see, there’s plenty to think about when placing cards.
Round End, Game End and Scoring
At the end of a round, first award the visitor to whichever player has best met the goal in multiplayer games; if there’s a tie, the card joins the next visitor along as an additional goal for the following round. In solo games, if you’ve met the goal for the particular round, you gain the card, otherwise it is either discarded (easy play) or kept as a penalty (hard)—see scoring below for what that means.
If the events module is in play, reveal and play the event card now.
Unless it’s the final round, the cards below the visitor and anything remaining in the nursery are added to the discard pile and the lot shuffled together to form the draw deck for the upcoming round, with a new nursery being formed from the top 3 cards.
Play then continues where it was left off, whether that’s an interrupted player completing their turn, or the next person starting theirs. If the end game has been triggered, play continues until all players have had an equal number of turns (i.e., play returns to the starting player); in a solo game, you get to take one additional turn.
At the end of the game, final scores are calculated from
· the scores marked on face up cards in your forest;
· relevant scoring effects on the topmost cards in the forest, e.g., if Black Gooseberry from the start of this article is at the top of its stack, take an extra point for each fruiting plant icon in the stack;
· points from awarded visitor cards;
· a point for each stored energy unit (i.e., face down cards) in the forest;
· an elevation bonus—count the number of plants (not stored energy) in each stack, and gain twice the height of the smallest stack at each elevation in points;
· one additional point for each pair of cards left in your hand.
The elevation bonus means you need to balance the stacks at various layers to maximise that contribution: it’s not helpful to have one huge stack when another slot at that level is empty.
As an example, an end game forest would have many more trees than the one appearing at the head of the turn structure section, but I wanted to keep the arithmetic simple! Scoring it would give 31 (ignoring visitors and cards in hand), comprising:
· face up scores—17 (don’t forget the covered shade-tolerant cards) +
· scoring effects—3 (there are no other plants at Mountain Hemlock’s elevation!) +
· stored energy—5 +
· elevation—6 (the minimum stack size at each level is 1).
Solo play is essentially a beat-your-high-score along with a win/lose threshold step. You compare your score as above with a target score, comprising the sum of the card scores for all 30 in the solo deck, and if you’re playing the hard variation, include the scores for any visitors not gained. If your score is higher than the target, you win. This means your strategy in the solo game is to capitalise on scoring effects and other bonuses, since the numbers visible on the cards kind of just cancel out—which is a pretty good strategy to keep in mind when playing multiplayer games too.
About the author:
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Spooktacular, with a side of Terraforming Mars and Paleo. When not playing games or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside over 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). In any time left over after all that, L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
