If you haven’t come across Forest Shuffle games before, it’s a game in which you play flora and fauna into your forest, paying attention to their habitat requirements in the form of how the various cards score in combination.
Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor is a standalone sequel to the original Forest Shuffle using animals and plants that could be found in environments like Dartmoor (though, reading this article, I get the impression that the real Dartmoor is less biodiverse than it used to be).
This is a roughly hour-long game for 2–5 players (BoardGameGeek says 2 is best), suitable for ages 10 and up. A solo mode is also available, if you’re prepared to jump through some hoops.
Gameplay
If you’ve played the original Forest Shuffle (for the sake of brevity, I’ll just use the word ‘original’ from now on to indicate that variant of the game), you’ll pretty much have this down pat—the only brand-new feature is terrain, so skip ahead a few paragraphs. (The rulebook annotates anything new to Dartmoor with ‘new,’ making it a quick skim for experienced Forest Shuffle players.)
To set up, shuffle the flora and fauna deck and select a number of cards depending on player count, putting the rest back in the box. Three winter cards (final card shown in the image below) are then mixed into the bottom third of the deck; these indicate when the game is nearing its close, with the end being triggered when the final one is revealed.
Deal each player 6 cards, and place the remaining deck at the left of the clearing board, leaving space for a discard pile on the right.
Shuffle the cave cards (top right card in the picture below) and lay out as many as there are players; players choose one in reverse order of play, and place it to the side of their play area. In a change from the original, the caves are asymmetric, giving players different advantages or bonuses, somewhat like those in the Forest Shuffle: Exploration expansion.
The turn structure is simple: either draw a pair of cards from the clearing and/or deck, or play a card. Note that there is a hand limit of 10, so if you already have that many, you can’t draw more (i.e., no temporarily going higher and discarding cards you don’t like!). If you draw one of the winter cards, place it aside and draw another, except for the third one, when the game ends immediately. New to Dartmoor is a third-turn alternative: if, and only if, you can’t draw or play, you can reveal your hand to everyone, discard a pair of cards, and draw replacements as your turn. Incidentally, publisher Lookout Games has made instructions for an initial drafting mode for the original available via their website, to reduce the likelihood of starting off with a stinker of a hand; the same mechanism could be applied here, to perhaps reduce the likelihood of needing to use this third option.
To play a card, you place it in front of you, adding it to your forest. The majority of the cards have a cost, indicated on the top left, paid by discarding that many cards from your hand. It doesn’t matter which cards you discard, though some cards offer bonuses if you pay with specific types, as indicated by an icon in the top right. (There are a lot of icons on these cards, and all quite small, and some colours are quite similar.) Most cards can only be played onto a tree (strictly, tree or shrub, but for brevity I’ll just use the term ‘tree’) or terrain space, so the first card(s) you’ll want to play are of those types.
Trees (the first card in the picture above) have ‘slots’ on all four sides, into which you play other cards, typically at most just a single one, though there are a few exceptions (e.g., the Cuckoo must go on top of a tree which already has another bird there, or if a tree has a Dartmoor Badger attached to it, you can place as many Dartmoor Black Rabbits as you want on it). When you play a tree card, you must also reveal one card from the deck into the clearing. Terrain cards (second above), new to Dartmoor, are played horizontally, and only have slots at the top and bottom, with two of each.
The remainder of the cards are split either vertically or horizontally, showing two plants or animals which can inhabit your forest. You choose which half you want to add, pay the appropriate number of cards, and tuck it underneath a tree or terrain card in front of you, such that only your chosen half is visible. At the bottom of the (half) card you played, you may see a bonus action which you can take, perhaps dependent on which cards you used to pay for it, and how the card scores—more on that in the next section.
Note that in the original, you could choose to play a card face down as a sapling; not something people would do often, but it’s a way to compensate for having a fistful of split cards and an insufficient number of trees in your forest. In this game, cards can indeed be used face down as a ‘universal moor,’ but only if this is triggered by a card bonus operation (e.g., by playing the Black-Tailed Godwit), not simply by choosing to do so. I suppose the inability to play a card in this way is the reason for that third turn option, since you could get out of such a hole by playing a sapling in the original.
At the end of your turn, if the clearing ends up with 10 or more cards, discard them all. Play passes to the next person, and this continues until the third winter card is drawn.
A note on player count: I feel this game works better at lower numbers of players, as the clearing is more stable. With more players, cards you have your eye on are more likely to be ‘stolen’ before you get to them, or disappear because the clearing overflows and has to be emptied. (I do wonder if the clearing size should shrink at lower counts to even out that latter effect.)
Scoring
As you can see from the previous section, how to play the game is pretty easy; it’s why you would play particular cards that need some thinking. Forest Shuffle’s scoring is like doing a maths GCSE: every plant and animal has a different way of scoring. For example, the Cuckoo mentioned earlier scores 7 points for each bird—simples, while the Badger scores 2 points for every pawed (indicated by a particular icon) animal in the whole forest, and Rabbits score the square of the number of them you have. The Black-Tailed Godwit scores only if no one else has more terrain cards than you. Butterflies score on the basis of the number of different species; the Blanket Bog (a terrain card) doesn’t score for itself, but doubles the score of cards placed below it. Crab Apples score only if all 4 sides are occupied; similarly, Nuthatches are worth points if the tree they’re on is fully occupied. And so on, and on, and on…
Some people enjoy all these arithmetical gymnastics, but for the rest of us, the Dartmoor Smart Counter automates almost everything—point your phone camera at each populated tree and terrain in your forest, and it does the rest. True, you do need to tidy up the tree a little, making sure cards are nicely aligned, but it does a pretty good job in general. If it misrecognises cards, there’s an easy mechanism for correcting its mistakes.
As you’re playing the game, you’ll be mentally juggling all these scoring possibilities, optimising what cards you draw and which you play, where and when. Then there are the bonus actions too—the game can become very thinky if you let it, or you can just have a cosy, relaxing time of putting all the pretty plants and animals out. (And they are pretty: artists Toni Llobet and Judit Piella have done an excellent job.)
Solo
That brings me on to solo play, a pleasant way to fritter away some time. Exploration includes a 20-card automa for playing with the original, which operates by adding and removing cards from the clearing on each turn, as if another player was interacting with it. (Strictly, it’s not actually an automa since it can’t win, but no matter.) I can’t think of any reason why these same cards couldn’t be used here if you happen to have them. Lookout Games has made a downloadable Print-and-Play version specifically for Dartmoor available along with instructions. (Incidentally, the automa cards for the original are also available for printout via their website.) The cards don’t have exactly the same distribution of adds and removes as the original’s, but I don’t know how much difference that makes in practice. There’s also a convenient fan-created automa web app, using the cards from the original.
As well as a simple beat-your-high-score mechanism, the solo play options include a number of challenges, broadly based around having certain numbers of particular types of cards in your forest.
Comparisons
I wanted to compare this game to the original, but I can’t really do that properly without mentioning the various expansions.
There is a consensus that the original Forest Shuffle is somewhat unbalanced (just have a wander through the BoardGameGeek forums to read all about it), and its expansions, Alpine and Woodland Edge, alleviate this somewhat, though I’m not sure if everyone’s convinced. (Exploration is really about the asymmetric caves and solo mode, with a bunch of promo cards which may or may not affect balance, so I’ll discount those.) This really only affects hard-core shufflers, and the more casual player won’t notice. One other comment I’ll make regarding balance is that with a large deck of cards and scoring based on making patterns with particular cards, you will be at the mercy of Lady Luck: if the card you need just won’t turn up, balance may not be a huge issue.
Dartmoor is said to be more balanced from the start, though strategy discussions on BGG suggest there are definitely good and bad cards to have…
On that note, if you do want to take the game—either variant—seriously, you’ll need to put some time into poring through the large decks and scoring combinations, learning the distribution of cards and critters, to best exploit what comes up in play.
The game does have a single expansion at the moment, Exmoor, but it’s not clear if it has any effect on balance or strategy, beyond adding more cards to the mix. (I can say I’d absolutely have them, but because the illustrations are so gorgeous!)
What about size? With 3 expansions compared to Dartmoor’s single, surely Forest Shuffle is the better bet… Looking at just the base games, both contain 180 cards; however, 14 of Forest Shuffle’s are scoring reference cards, making Dartmoor the winner, but only by a smidge. If you take into account the expansions, note that Forest Shuffle’s are smaller, so bundling all three in takes you to 248 playable cards (though some of those are promos, some of which are more useful as decoration than in play)—Exploration also includes the automa cards as well as 13 related to solo challenges. Dartmoor and Exmoor together give you 235 cards, so the original noses ahead this time, again not by much. Basically, there’s little to choose between them in terms of card count as the games stand currently.
So, which game is the one to choose? I do have to admit that seeing local plants and animals is quite pleasant, and if I were new to the game, I think I’d get Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor… Or should I say, get it first. On the other hand, it’s nice to have the automa cards printed out, so the original plus expansions is also very tempting, balanced or not. The original is marginally simpler too, since it lacks the terrain cards. As a fairly casual player of the game, I can’t really say one is better than the other.
To add to the mix, Forest Shuffle: Smoky Mountains is also available, which replaces moors terrain with river terrain, and also has an interesting mechanism for combining trees and rivers. This game is a lot more eye-catching, with bright—almost garish—colours.
Just in case you were thinking about it, according to their rulebooks, the new games can’t be combined with the original. I imagine people have tried and will continue to do so, but the resulting mishmash is sure to be confusing and even more unbalanced.
Warning: extreme guesswork ahead… Based on the existence of the newer games, it does seem unlikely that a major new expansion will come for the original, so the ‘future-proofing’ option might be to pick Dartmoor or perhaps better still, Smoky Mountains.
Another game to bring up is Reforest (well, two games: Reforest: Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast and Reforest: Old Growth).
This is a similar forest-building game, revolving around stacking cards and paying for them with other cards. Reforest includes objective cards (a bit like the challenges in Forest Shuffle: Exploration) as well as card-specific scoring, and I wonder if introducing something like this to Forest Shuffle’s competitive play might compensate for issues with balance. Another difference is that most of the details on Forest Shuffle’s cards relate to scoring, with only a few offering one-time or ongoing effects, while in Reforest, the majority of card effects are ones that affect play, which means you do have to pay a bit more attention to action triggers. Both games’ cards have gorgeous artwork, but they also feature tiny icons, more so in Reforest. Reforest: Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast is a lot more compact than Forest Shuffle, both in terms of the amount of space needed to play it and how tiny the game box is; Reforest: Old Growth kind of ruins that compactness, but the Forest Shuffle boxes still have more empty space.
Both games have the same puzzly nature and take about the same length of time to play, though Reforest can support only up to 4 players. Overall, I like them both, but Forest Shuffle’s more vivid artwork vies against Reforest’s significantly higher quality cards.
Wrap Up
Compared to the original, terrain cards add a little bit of variety to how plants and animals are played, but I’m undecided about whether the game is better with or without that.
Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor works very well as a relaxing solo, so it’s slightly disappointing that the automa cards aren’t included in the box. Yes, a Print-and-Play version is available, but that’s a bit of a faff. There is always the app, though, but somehow, it’s just not the same as having cards.
All of the Forest Shuffle games are pleasant and attractively illustrated puzzlers. There isn’t a huge amount of player interaction—stealing the card someone else might want from the clearing, and maximising your number of whatevers to prevent your opponent from scoring their other whatevers are about as far as it goes. It is tricky to hide your strategy from other players, since they can see what you have in your forest and which cards you’re grabbing from the clearing, but I do find I’m paying much more attention to my own hand and forest than others’—probably why I don’t often win!
Overall, if you like card-based nature games, your shelves deserve a copy of at least one Forest Shuffle! All it boils down to is picking the one with the pictures or price that appeals most, and avoid the original Forest Shuffle without expansions if balance is a major concern.
About the author
Current favourite board games are Ark Nova and Spooktacular, with a side of Terraforming Mars and Dune: Imperium – Uprising. 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.
