The third installment of the Forest Shuffle franchise feels like a return to form for a series that shot out of the blocks both for the gaming community and commercially, taking the hobby to potential new audiences who then might become gamers and become more like me - now, who wouldn’t want that!
Joking aside, the first Forest shuffle was brilliant, easy to pick up and play, conceptually interesting with the way split cards could be placed and stacked, lovely colourful artwork and a simple but fantastic mechanism - place a tree and place animals, insects and plants onto the cardinal points of said tree, collect species, multipliers and score your points. A light, friendly game perfect to kill an hour, especially if you don’t have time or headspace for anything too taxing.
Deck and hand management remains a thoughtful puzzle: discard cards to play cards into a clearing, and maybe you can get them back; maybe your opponent will grab it with slick gameplay. 30-40 minutes and a little bit of scoring, and what a terrific little game in a small box for £25. What I will add about the first game, though, is that the small box expansions made the game. It was pretty good as a base game, but the Woodland and Alpine expansions made it brilliant - just the right amount of deck dilution and uncertainty - no longer were you guaranteed to find the Bear or the Wolf or the Wild Boar.
Smoky Mountains carries on the colourful theme of the original - a bit lacking in the Dartmoor version - and introduces rivers that run under or by your placed trees, and these rivers can be played as a flipped card horizontally but only under a tree unless it is a specific river terrain card - no longer can you flip a card and plant a sapling either.
It is a stand-alone version of the game, and not interchangeable with previous versions. If you didn’t like the original version, you won’t like this, but I have a strong feeling that if you loved the original, you will love this.
Trees are still the mainstay of your tableau, and you still need them. This might be geared towards a mix of arboreal and aquatic animals, but you still need trees, and in one game we seemed to have put nearly all of them in the player count discard pile. It made it interesting - you need trees to be able to place universal rivers, so there was one instance of not being able to take a turn; thankfully, this is on occasion expected and covered in the rules.
With the advent of rivers the look and feel of the game has changed, yes you can place moor cards in Dartmoor horizontally, but in FS Smoky Mountains rivers are a central theme and critical for some animal placement in order to score - you can put fish into your rivers but you can only place Bald Eagles and Ootters onto trees with water so it has to be on a river. Miss your chance to put the river on your tree when you place it, and you’ve missed that chance.
Iconography is pretty consistent, although there are some new ones to look out for, like being able to place a river after you place a tree or a bear, for example - look out for those bears, big animals, and potentially big scorers! There are a few other scoring changes that those familiar with previous games will need to adapt to - river combos will score well, and if you can capture the colour placement combos as well, there are some real score chains to be had, and a new mechanic that allows you to search the deck for a card type and play it.
The addition of the expansions in the first game added the right amount of uncertainty - the base game cards had enough variety but you did get to a point where you could almost gaurantee a Roe Deer or Squaeker would come out at some point - the expansion added enough dilution to make you have to think a bit more about your placements - this new game might hit the same buffers after say 20 plays - and of course it is ripe for expansions, no doubt pretty much on their way to the printers as I write!
I really love this new addition, and I might be a bit controversial here and say that Dartmoor wasn’t as good as the first iteration - it just looked a bit drab compared to its predecessor, and the gameplay system being so successful in the first game was adapted slightly for Moor cards, but it just felt a bit flat. Maybe because the first game was so good it was like the middle film in a trilogy, a placeholder or stepping stone to the climactic finale. Either way, that Dartmoor trough has been supplemented by a Smoky Mountains peak, pun intended.
This feels a bit like that - suffice it to say, if we want to play Forest Shuffle, we always go to the base game and honestly never pick Dartmoor. This new version won’t change that feeling about Dartmoor. I Can’t see a scenario where we would choose that over the base game or Smoky Mountains.
It just looks so good on the table; the colours and artwork are so lovely, and it is a testament to the care taken to represent the wildlife and fauna of the Smoky Mountains. The feel is more late season, with more autumnal colours, and the clearing looks beautiful.
Scoring remains a bit of a task, there is an app that you can use to help with that although to us its more fun to go through it manually - one of the things that we also like about all of the shuffles is that unless it is very onesided its not always obvious who is winning or won until final scoring, which keeps it interesting and adds a bit of spice right until that third winter card. The scoring is all part of the fun.
Let's face it, if you liked any of the previous Forest Shuffles, you will be adding this to your collection, and you should; it's great. It looks great, plays great, and will give you and your friends loads of fun. So if anyone asks if you “fancy a quick shuffle?” you say yes, and take a lovely hour in the Smoky Mountains.
