Forest Shuffle review: Stories sprout in gentle competition
Weave a web of meaningful micro-narratives within the serenity of the deep forest.
Score: ❇️❇️❇️🟩🟩
Enough complexity and meaningful interaction to lay basic story seeds, and time for them to evolve in the serenity of the forest. Emergent narratives aren’t explicitly encouraged, but there are serendipitous kernels with the potential to spark a story.
Forest Shuffle | £26.97 at Amazon
Strategy | 2-5 players | 40-60 mins | Age 10+
Why buy Forest Shuffle?
✔️ FSC certified - no plastic whatsoever
✔️ Easy to anthropomorphise the little forest creatures
✔️ Fascinating interplay between card abilities
Why not buy Forest Shuffle?
✖️ Difficult to connect stories
✖️ Not explicitly a story game
Forest Shuffle is a hand management-style strategy card game that sees players competing to build the most efficient ecosystem. It’s light, delightfully tender, and though it doesn’t seem like the kind of game that would encourage narrative emergence, there’s just enough complexity here for storytellers to draw from. Lets hash it out.
Drawing blindly, or from the open pool in the center, you use the cards in your hand as currency, paying to introduce new flora, fauna and fungi into your own personal and dynamic forest spread. Each card interacts with a number of others to increase your ecosystem’s acorn count. The more acorns at the end of the game, the better.
As you start to build up your spread, little micro-narratives start to emerge as you balance out your ecosystem. It’s easy to visualise how terribly a forest full of predators with a single source of prey would play out, for example. Or imagine a player deploying a literal bear to swipe all the goodies from the pool and haul them back to their cave, leaving you with a severe lack of choice for padding out your spread.
Despite Forest Shuffle’s competitive nature, the fact that points aren’t totaled until the end of the game means you’re not constantly tracking your opponent’s progress. You have a vague idea of how well other players are doing from the size of their spread, but since no one calculates as they go, the game stays relatively serene. It leaves space for your mind to wander, and for internal narratives to develop.
Totaling at the end also means that the true interconnectivity of both ecosystems doesn’t reveal itself until the game is over, meaning there’s not much opportunity to draw links between stories. Collaboration is sparse throughout, but once the endgame calculations are done there’s more of a chance to bounce story ideas off one another in hindsight.
The game features both immediate and latent take-that actions that can add interest, too. Some let you block your opponent, such as the simple act of selecting a card another player needed. These moments are often serendipitous (unless you’re really paying attention to their spread), and can birth some meaningful conflict in whatever story is unfolding in your head.
Forest Shuffle is a simple concept, but scattered in the undergrowth are a host of fascinating dynamics — between the cards themselves, and player interactions — that give it the depth and interest necessary for emergence to sprout. Sure it doesn’t actively encourage stories or give explicit prompts, but through thwarted strategies and deep interplay, there’s a great foundation here for a true MythHead to cultivate some forest-themed narratives.
Publisher: Lookout Games
Designer: Kosch
Artists: Toni Llobet, Judit Piella, Klemens Franz, Andrea Kattnig
Thanks for reading! For more, check out my other MythHash reviews. Guides and other emergent goodies can be found on my Substack. For more delivered right into your inbox, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
About the author
Hi, I’m Katie Wickens — Games MA (Norwich Uni of the Arts) with a focus on worldbuilding and emergent narrative. I’ve already got hundreds of thousands of eyes on my work across the web with 5 years experience writing about digital and tabletop games, and the tech that surrounds them.
I’m a PC Gamer alumni, and freelancer for GamesRadar, TechRadar, Dicebreaker and more. You might have spotted some of my tabletop game reviews in Senet Magazine, too! I designed MythMash, the upcoming storytelling board game for weirdos, and I’ve been running a board game design workshop in Bath for a year now.