Whispering Woods is a deceptively simple, nature-themed, tile laying puzzle game: exactly the type of game I usually love! But is it worth shouting about?
If you go down to the woods today…
Thematically, Whispering Woods is all about creating paths through a mystical forest which animals can follow to gather the elements used to protect their home. Slightly more abstractly, in practical terms you’ll be selecting hexagonal tiles from a shared display and placing them to create your personal forest and the paths through it. The theme is, admittedly, a little pasted on, but it does result in some beautiful box artwork and cute animeeples to play with.
Whispering Woods is a deceptively simple, nature-themed, tile laying puzzle game: exactly the type of game I usually love! But is it worth shouting about?
If you go down to the woods today…
Thematically, Whispering Woods is all about creating paths through a mystical forest which animals can follow to gather the elements used to protect their home. Slightly more abstractly, in practical terms you’ll be selecting hexagonal tiles from a shared display and placing them to create your personal forest and the paths through it. The theme is, admittedly, a little pasted on, but it does result in some beautiful box artwork and cute animeeples to play with.
Sadly, the bear is just the first player marker rather than a playable animal.
You start the game by choosing a set of four animeeples along with your starting tile (which is the same for each player). Place the starting tile to begin your forest and place one of your animeeples on it. Next, set up the display by picking six random tiles from the bag and place them in reach of all players. Each tile has two sides: a coloured, forest side where the colour corresponds to one of the six elements you can collect; and a task side which displays a path your animeeple must follow.
Players then take it in turns to pick tiles from the display and place them in their forest. Each turn you have two choices when selecting tiles. One option is to take two tiles and place them forest side up, allowing you to build the paths your animeeples can follow to complete tasks. The other option is to take a single tile and place it task side up then place one of your spare animeeples on it. Each task shows a sequence of elements that your animeeple must collect by following a path from tile to tile.
After placing your tiles, you can optionally complete tasks by moving an animeeple from a task tile along the indicated sequence of forest tiles. You then remove the task tile you started on from your forest and flip the tile you finished on from the forest side to its task side. Each task you complete earns you points at the end of the game, the longer the path, the higher the score.
At the start of the next turn, you refill the display by taking random tiles from the bag and then play continues with the next player. The game end is triggered when one player completes a specific number of tasks, dependent on the number of players. After finishing the round, everyone totals the points from their completed tasks and the player with the highest score wins.
Nature trails
I may have made things sound more complicated than they are! In practice, the actions you take on your turn are really quite simple: take one or two tiles from the display and place them in your forest. The only placement rule is that each tile must always be in contact with another.
However, that simple action masks a surprisingly complex, brain-burning puzzle! What makes things complicated (and fun), is that you’re allowed to complete multiple paths on each turn. Chaining together a series of tasks like this not only makes you feel like a genius but also earns you a bonus card which adds more points to your score at the end of the game. The more tasks you complete in one turn, the higher the value of the bonus card.
The number of bonus cards is limited, with the higher-scoring cards in shorter supply. This leads to a game of brinksmanship with your opponents: each new tile drawn from the bag presents another opportunity to extend your scoring chain and tempts you into delaying just one more turn. But wait too long and someone else might swoop in to steal the coveted bonus card or, even worse, trigger the end of the game before you get chance to complete your paths!
Keeping track of the sequence of tasks you want to perform is tricky enough when you have a single animeeple to deal with. If you really want a challenge, you can recruit more animals by choosing and placing more task tiles. If you can plan far enough ahead you can accomplish some incredibly satisfying and high-scoring turns, but good luck attempting to co-ordinate a full roster of four animals!
I definitely had a plan here…
If a tree falls in the forest…
The feat of concentration required to remember all your planned paths from turn to turn lends Whispering Woods its extremely appropriate title: you won’t hear much while you’re playing other than the sound of each player quietly muttering their way through the combinations of tasks they want to perform. In similar nature-themed, tile laying games such as Harmonies and Cascadia, there’s usually enough spare mental capacity to look at what other players are doing and work out their plans. Good luck trying to do that here! You’ll be so focused on your own game that you won’t have time to pay attention to anything else.
If you’re looking for a lot of player interaction in your boardgames, you’re not going to find it in Whispering Woods. Apart from the potential for other players to take the tile you desperately wanted, there isn’t really any opportunity for them to influence your game – this is very much a multiplayer solitaire type of affair.
This does mean that there’s very little overhead in learning the game’s challenging solo mode. Here, you’ll have a limited number of turns to achieve a minimum score with six difficulty levels to choose from. Each level of difficulty asks you to accomplish a number of tasks with a variety of increasingly stringent conditions attached.
Although the solo mode challenges are difficult, playing alone feels a little more peaceful without the pressure to complete your turns before other players get fed up of waiting.
Can’t see the wood for the trees
One of the fun things about the solo mode is that you get to use one of each animeeple, rather than four of the same type. There was no need for the developers to create four different types of animeeple in the first place – I’m sure it would have been easier and cheaper to produce the same animal shape in four different colours, but I appreciate the extra effort and attention to detail in the added variety. Even the colours used for each animal are appropriate, with green frogs, red cardinals, yellow deer and, erm, blue bunnies.
Okay, so blue rabbits are a bit of a stretch.
This commitment to production quality is evident throughout the game with extra thick card used for the tiles, giving them a satisfyingly chunky feel. The artwork on the tiles is simple but effective with clear iconography communicating each task’s requirement. The two-sided nature of the tiles is clever, although it can be fiddly to flip them, especially when you finish a task somewhere in the middle of your forest.
I do wish that the style of art used on the box had filtered through more to the game’s components. Here the art has an ethereal, dreamlike quality very much in keeping with Whispering Woods’ mystical theme, while the tiles are necessarily somewhat more functional, revealing the true nature of the game as an abstract puzzler.
Lost in the woods
If you enjoy a lot of player interaction, Whispering Woods probably isn’t the game for you. For me, the absorbing puzzle more than makes up for this and I’m just as happy playing with others as I am taking on the challenges of the solo mode.
If you’ve enjoyed tile laying puzzle games like Cascadia and Harmonies and you want a bit more of a challenge, Whispering Woods will keep you entertained for many hours and I highly recommend it: Whispering Woods is wonderful.
Zatu Review Summary
Zatu Score
88%
