Reforest (or Reforest: Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast, to give it it’s full name) is a charming 1–4 player, card-placing game, taking half to an hour to play. It’s designed by Sébastien Bernier-Wong and published by Firestarter Games.
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.
Gameplay Summary
Players start with a hand of 5 cards, and there’s a shared draw deck (consisting of specific numbers of cards depending on player count, ranging from 90 for 4 players to a mere 30 for a solo game) with 3 turned face-up, in what’s known as the ‘nursery.’ Above that is a row of ‘visitors,’ which I’ll describe later.
On your turn, you can either gather plants (i.e., take up to 2 cards from the nursery or deck) or play a plant from your hand into your forest, which can trigger several side-effects. Whichever option you choose, note that there is a 7-card limit at the end of a turn—you can have more during the turn, but will then have to discard down to 7. Play passes to the next person, and this continues until the deck has been emptied (even if that occurs mid-turn).
Cards have a cost in the top left corner, which is the number of other cards to discard in order to play this one. You can also use ‘stored energy’ (more on that later) to pay part of the cost, and other cards in your forest may offer discounts as well. Below the cost is an indication of where in your forest the plant can grow—your forest is arranged as a row of 3 spaces at the lowest ‘elevation,’ 2 above that, and a single space forming the peak—and some cards must be planted at specific elevations; the very first card you play has to be placed be at the lowest elevation, with subsequent cards being played adjacent to any card in the forest. Next on the left of the card is ‘shade tolerance’—either an uncovered sun (indicating that the plant will die if put in the shade of another) or a half-covered one (indicating that the plant will survive in shade).
When you place a card into the forest, it can either go in an empty space (subject to elevation and adjacency constraints), or it can be played on top of another at the appropriate elevation one, and in that latter case, it must also be taller than the plant it covers, indicated below the shade tolerance icon. If you play a card on top of another, you discount the cost of the new card by the cost of the topmost card being covered.
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 bottom row of icons showing—each card has a bunch of icons indicating various attributes of the plant (e.g., whether the plant has flowers, or whether it’s evergreen). These are therefore still visible for shade-tolerant plants in your forest (as well as those on top of the stack, of course) and can contribute towards other cards’ actions and bonuses, but lost for the shade-intolerant ones.
The next area of interest on each card is the text just above the attribute row, the ‘plant effect’—these effects describe an action which:
- (white background to the text) can trigger when the card is played, e.g., play another card;
- (green background) provide on-going effects as long as the card isn’t covered, e.g., reducing the cost of cards planted in the same elevation;
- (pink) react to other cards being played, e.g., placing a card with a particular attribute 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., gain additional points if adjacent to specific attributes.
I think one of the nicest features of the game is the wide range of plant effects, making the game such a rich puzzle.
In order to get straight into gameplay, I skipped over one bit of setup: you create a row of visitors, one for each round of the game—these are animal cards which offer end of round bonuses (e.g., extra points for the player with most stored energy, or having most of some specific plant attribute). The first 2 visitors have a number of plant cards tucked under them (how many depending on player count). As noted earlier, a round ends as soon as the plant draw deck is empty; at this point, players compare the bonus requirements on the leftmost visitor, with one player taking the card. If there’s a tie, the visitor isn’t given out, but moves to the next pile, to become an additional goal for the following round.
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. Play then continues where it was left off, whether that’s an interrupted player completing their turn, or the next person starting theirs.
At the end of the game, final scores are calculated from the scores marked on topmost cards in your forest, scoring plant effects on any of those cards, points from visitor cards, an elevation score based on the height of the smallest stacks at each elevation, and additional points from stored energy and cards left in your hand. The highest scoring player is the winner.
An optional ‘events’ module is provided to add a bit more spice to the game. A random event card is used between rounds, which can have a catastrophic effect on people: e.g., a lightning strike can kill each player’s tallest plant, or flooding can wipe out all plants which aren’t water-tolerant.
Finally, the game also includes a solitaire mode, in which you discard a card from the nursery or draw deck each time you gather, but otherwise mainly as described earlier. Scoring, however, is a bit different, in that after calculating your score as above, you subtract the numerical scores printed on all 30 of the cards in the solitaire deck, which means you need to focus on playing high value cards and maximising scoring plant effects.
Expansion
Reforest’s 2024 release was followed up by a successful Kickstarter project and release of a standalone expansion to the game, Reforest: Old Growth in 2025. Old Growth can be played by itself or used as an expansion for the original game—actually, it’s probably more accurate to treat Reforest as an expansion to Old Growth, since the latter totally supersedes the original, leaving it as little more than extra cards (though there are a lot of them, and there’s little overlap in actions).
Besides cards, Old Growth provides 3 new features:
- old growth trees—the aged giants of the forest, with high scores and the ability to ‘regenerate’ some plants they cover (the rationale is that they can indirectly provide extra nutrients for plants growing beneath them);
- parasitic plants—these take shade tolerance to an extra level, in that they must be placed in the shade of another plant and will be played underneath other cards; and
- terrain cards—an optional module (like events) providing player-specific scoring opportunities.
While I like the idea of the parasitic plants, I find the other additions less interesting, and feel that the whole shebang piles too much extra complexity on top of a small and slick game.
It also comes in an enormous box, relatively speaking (leaving room for future expansions, perhaps), as opposed to the tiny, pocket-sized package that makes up the original Reforest.
Wrap Up
Reforest: Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast is a gem of a game, with gorgeous illustrations by Janine van Fram. Production quality is high, with a nice linen finish on the cards, though let down by the box: it’s rather fragile, and would have been nicer as a box and lid rather than a tuckbox. Even the wrapper the box comes in is attractive, not to mention environmentally sound, as is the game itself (apparently printed on FSC certified paper).
The game’s compact, both in terms of space need to play and the fact that that box is tiny, with no wasted space—much better than those games packaged with massive empty spaces to give a bigger presence in shop shelves (yes, Splendor, I’m looking at you—that game has the highest wasted space to actual content ratio of any game I own; a great game, but the box really annoys me).
As far as playing the game goes, I like the trade-offs in targeting visitor scoring possibilities vs overall forest, not to mention focussing on specific plant attributes for their bonuses. There’s also a nice interaction between wanting to keep drawing cards to get the ‘best’ cards into your hand to subsequently play vs causing a round to end prematurely, thus losing some card-playing opportunities because the draw deck is depleted.
The expansion could be a better starting point for gameplay, with its additional features, but I find the convenience and speed of play of the original game to be preferable, not to mention the compactness meaning it’s easy to take on the go. For me, the choice is a bit like Wingspan: Asia vs Wingspan: while Asia adds extra game features, I find that I more often than not prefer the basic game without the extra faff. (Actually, I prefer the base game plus Oceania, for the nectar, but I’m straying off topic.) Having said that, as with Wingspan: Asia, you can ignore the extra bits and bobs in Old Growth and play an approximation to the original game, but with a different set of cards.
Finally, if you fancy trying it before you buy, the publisher has made a print & play solo demo available, which can give a flavour of play. This also lets you evaluate how much you like the additional features in Old Growth to help decide which version of the game to get. (Or do I mean which one to get first?)
About the author
Current favourite boardgames are Ark Nova and Paleo, with a side of Terraforming Mars and Rebirth. 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.
