Into the Woods – Introduction
Life in the forest exists in a delicate balance, from the humble gnats and fireflies, through the chirping chaffinches and soaring goshawks, to the antler-crowned deer and prowling wolves. But at the woodland’s edge, things become a little brighter. Striped boar piglets gambol amongst the elderberry under their mother’s watchful gaze; magpies pick at blackthorn berries; map butterflies shimmer in the evening sun. Out of the shadow of the towering sycamores and oaks, tangles of shrubs support new life, from bush-crickets to bison.
Woodland Edge is an expansion to the original Forest Shuffle, a tableau-building game which sees players placing animal cards around trees, the backbones of forest life, to score points in various set-collecting and colour-matching ways. Cards are visually split in half horizontally or vertically, meaning you must place one half under your tree, covering it up, and only one card can go on each side of a tree. You draw from a shared deck, and to play a card you are required to discard cards equal to its cost, placing them in the shared ‘Clearing’, a space from which face-up cards may then also be drawn. The Woodland Edge expansion adds a new type of card to place cards around, the Shrub, which we’ll explain momentarily, and a host of new creatures. It doesn’t add many new mechanics, but neatly proliferates the flora and fauna of the base game.
Fields of Flowers – Gameplay
The new Shrub cards are fun, as unlike Trees – which just score points – they offer their own bonus and also act as ‘Fern’ and ‘Plant’ card types to enhance cards from the base game (like insects that score based on how many different types of plant you have). I can only imagine this was done to buff these lines of strategy in the face of the powerful Deer and Wolf combo that was threatening the game’s balance (these cards from the base game play off each other in an almost snowball-effect manner and were hard to counter). Like little pops of floral colour sprouting up amongst the roots of oaks and sycamores, there’s a nice interplay of decision-making between playing a Tree, with its interconnected scoring benefits from the base game, or a Shrub, which is its own contained scoring system. Like clearings in the forest, more avenues are opened up for experimenting with strategy.
A number of new creatures are introduced, but creatures which play off one another are often printed on the same cards (meaning you have to cover one of them up and don’t get the dual benefit of both). My instincts tell me this is for some kind of balance reason… but in practice I think it’s just mean. It means you have to choose one side then wait for the other creature to come up a SECOND time. On top of that, depending on how many players you have, a not insignificant number of cards are already removed from the game during setup. This further decreases the odds that the creature you need will even appear at all.
Dappled Light – Visuals
The artwork is painterly and serene. The blue skies of this expansion contrast really beautifully with the noticeably darker base cards, which were hazily overshadowed by the forest canopy above. These new ones enrich your little ecosystem not just with new species but with a warmth and sunlit brightness.
The icons are legible and bold, not clashing with the woodland greens and browns. In this expansion, however, there’s a semi-new icon added, meaning you draw a card from the Clearing (the communal discard pile, where cards litter the forest floor like leaves) instead of blindly from the top of the deck. However, the only difference between the two icons is… the words ‘From the clearing’ next to an identical card draw icon. I spent a long time looking at the instructions and fruitlessly Googling how to tell the difference between two identical symbols before I realised it was the awkward accompanying text that was the key. A spot of clunkiness in an otherwise very legible iconography.
Tooth and Claw – Critiques
As with the base game, the decision space feels somewhat limited by what’s in your hand. I don’t mean moment to moment, either, snuffling amongst the leaf litter; we’re talking long-term hibernation planning, with your choice of which scoring sets you’ll be collecting as the game goes on being dictated, like natural selection, very heavily by the cards you’re initially dealt. Your mileage may vary, but all members of my gaming group are the type of people to gamble by waiting for specific creatures to be drawn (how can you not, when the game encourages colour-matching for additional bonuses?) rather than just playing what they have in-hand and hoping for the best. This does alter the dynamic in a way that can’t really be fixed by the game itself, instead relying on players altering the gameplay style they find most appealing. But like magpies, we find those colour-coded extra actions mighty tantalising…
In all seriousness, it’s quite difficult (though not impossible) to pivot in this game. This expansion makes that easier by, among other things, adding another Butterfly, more Bats (making it easier to get the ‘5 points for each bat once you have three bats’ strategy), more Squeakers (boar piglets) and a mother for them, who scores 10 points per Squeaker. However, the addition of the Boar female is uncharacteristically predatory, which is ironic for a maternal herbivore. It’s the only card in the game which truly feels like an intentional ‘gotcha’. Along with its Squeaker effect, it removes all cards in the Clearing from the game. Now, players could purposely empty the Clearing at the end of their turn by discarding enough cards from their hand to play an expensive card, denying an opponent a card they might sorely need. But if this didn’t line up with your own strategy, it hindered you just as much, and I’d say 99 times out of 100 it happened accidentally rather than as a mean move. The Boar female is the opposite, almost designed to be played to screw over an opponent, and as the only card in the game like this, feels nasty, especially amid such a harmonious theme.
The game overall sort of defies expansion, which is a shame because any problems that arise feel like they resist improvement. You add more cards to increase the variety of the game and buff some weaker strategies, you simultaneously dilute the card pool and make it less likely those cards will be drawn over the course of the game. This is an incredibly fine line to tread, particularly finicky in the tableau-building genre which relies on balancing set collection with random chance, lest players lose the ability to, you know, actually collect those sets.
These new cards are incredibly pretty and add a richness to the game just as it was starting to get predictable, but we found that along with the flourishing variety, the difficulty also noticeably increased. Rounds including the expansion reduced the relaxation factor, as the analysis paralysis grew like a forest floor fungus across each player’s turns.
On the flipside of this, the expansion adds not only even more butterflies, increasing the likelihood this card type will come up, but also adds shrubs which directly benefit butterfly cards, providing anything from card draw to even more points during final tally? This skyrockets the effectiveness of an already nearly broken strategy in the base game, and I now find myself actively pursuing other lines of point-scoring just so I don’t fall back on the dull tried and true butterfly method.
The Forest for the Trees – Final Thoughts
It’s this expansion versus dilution which is really at the heart of whether you will enjoy Woodland Edge. On repeat plays, and especially with more players than two, we found that the right cards came up, and everyone got to enjoy their own strategy without feeling too competitive. Unlike nature itself, Forest Shuffle is a completely uncombative game to start with, and while this expansion does add a few comparatively harsh cards in the form of protective Boar matriarchs and overabundances of butterflies, we find it to be another branch on this tree of life, growing seamlessly from the trunk of its solid game system and the gently swaying canopy of its cozy theme.
