Forest Shuffle - Board Game Review - Unbalanced Ecosystem

[Music] there'll be plenty of time to discuss your objections when and if you [Music] return hi everyone I'm Luke Hector and you're watching the broken meele this is a YouTube channel about board games where I give reviews top 10 and my honest opinions regardless of the consequences we'll get on with the show in just a minute but first a quick word for my sponsor as a fellow gamer you'll understand this is unacceptable the solution head down to my new sponsor kendra. Kender stocks many of the hot new releases as well as some old hidden gems free delivery on orders over £30 further discounts on bulk purchases and even 5% of your spending refunded back to you as points to be used for further discounts down the line if you use the referral Link in the description below and sign up for for a new account you'll get 5% discount on your first order over £60 so let's make gaps in your collection A F of the past get down to Kender and start saving today thank you for listening and enjoy the rest of the video get on with it today I'm taking a look at Forest Shuffle I was very keen to get this one for messing from my top 10 and everybody on the planet wanted me to get this game I've never received so many comments for anything I've done before saying get this game I love this game get this game so many people are fans of Forest Shuffle usually because of not because of essid but because of board game arena board game arena has had this on its website for a while I have chosen deliberately not to play it until I got this game and tried it out proper although I have also now played the mod on BGA I will comment on that later but you know God the amount of fans for this game was insane so okay fine I was anticipating it I mean Lookout games do some pretty solid card games it looked beautiful nice cover great nature artwork and you know me I'm a sucker for for these nature artwork themed games regardless of whether the themes there or not I just like the look of them so wasn't the most expensive thing in the world only about 25 I think 30 tots I think it was only 25 actually so not a bad price overall and I figured right come on please don't disappoint please don't [Laughter] disappoint what you see here is what you get this is essentially Forest Shuffle it is a card game where you are tally trying to amass the most points by combo building you have a clearing board in the middle of the table and you have a deck of cards which is set based on player count with three winter cards shuffled into the bottom third in a prescribed manner which means that when the third winter card comes up game ends so you're actually on a random timer what players do each round is very simple they draw two cards either from the deck or from face up cards in the clearing as the game goes on and what they'll do effectively is utilize the cards that they collect to score points in a lot of different ways there's all sorts of different types of animals in here you've got deers You've Got Bugs you've got wild boes you've got the different trees you've got wolves you've got butterflies you've got different plants you've got rabbits you've got toads Birds squirrels salamanders strawberries uh gnats you know red squirrels bats you name it there's something like that in here man I'm just glad they didn't put spiders now unlike most other snat games but the idea is is that you draw these cards and then you play them on the trees themselves so you have to first play a tree and then on that tree these cards have essentially got dual use so some of them have got uh top and the bottom and some of them have got the left and the right and when you play the cards you have to play them on a tree and it's effectively got four spots so I could play the butterfly on top of the tree I could play The Wolf on the right hand side of the tree I could play a fox on the left or I could play the Moss underneath and so each tree can hold four things up to you how many trees you get but there's lots of different trees as well and the game just proceeds in that manner drawing cards and playing cards in order to amass a ton of points by the end of the game but with the slight twist that the deck of cards effectively is everything in the game not only is it what you need in order to play but it's also the currency for actually playing anything and anytime that you pay a card for currency it goes face up in the middle which means that other opponents can then draw from there so it's a case of which cards do I allow my opponents to grab in the center some of them have even got bonuses they have color symbols at the top of the card and if you use these in order to pay the cost you might get some other bonus when you play the card that's pretty much all the rules you carry on until the third winter is done and then score up more on that later but uh we'll get to that point but of course once you figure out who's got the most points guess what they are of course combo building card games are a dime a dozen It's tricky to really pinpoint one out although one that does come to mind is something like San Juan which is another game where the deck of cards is kind of everything now in San Juan its resources its buildings its currency and the whole deck of cards is that thing here it's not quite as expansive as that but still the deck of cards is not only the creatures that you're playing or the trees that you're bu trees that you're growing it's also the currency to play the cards but I do like the unique twist here that the cards come out on show for other players so if you are going to play something pretty big you're giving away more cards I guess little card games like ays conspiracy did that where you know you wanted to get more choice and by doing so you give the opponents more Choice well I want to play a pretty good animal I want to play a wolf it cost me three cards though I got to put three cards face up in the clearing and the opponents might be like oo oh I wanted the raccoon yeah I'll take that one so you got to be very careful but yeah honestly pick most combo building card games that you're aware of and this is kind of similar to them it's not the most unique game in the world but hey you know doesn't always have to be perfectly unique as long as it's good firstly the artwork is beautiful as I said you've got this nice clearing board in the middle and all these cards have got very beautiful pictures of the different creatures on here the trees particularly look Sublime I mean this we're not talking canopy levels I think canopy is still like the gold poster child of this sort of thing but this artwork is still really really nice and it looks nice on the table and you've got all this stuff laid out although you will have a lot laid out more on that later but component wise the card are decent enough quality there a little bit on the Finish side but basically this one has gone out of its way to say it's a green game so it's you know not using a lot of plastic but if you don't want these cards to get damaged by the fact that you're using them for everything and the fact that you're having to slide them underneath cards all the time you're probably going to want to sleep these anyway which means you're going using plastic which then kind of goes against the whole point of this being Green Recycle those Plastics or else I'll turn you into aing tree the combo building aspect of this game is really really the whole meat of it and it is really good fun it is great to get a few cards in your hand and decide well I could play that for the badger but and I could play it for the hair that scores one way that scores another do I have the points in order the cards in order to get the bonus uh well if I draw those from the center I will is it worth taking timeout for that uh well I know another tree's popped out I could grab another horse chestnut tree well I've got one already I've got two down here that's a lot of points uh do I draw from here ah but then oh wait a minute if I play this tree I need to spend two cards but then which cards do I get rid of that whole that whole choice of you know if I want to play something I didn't have to get rid of other cards it works brilliantly in any game that uses that mechanic and here no exception it's a great one as well you know I'm constantly having to have very angsty decisions about what I play when I play what I use to play it and what combos I'm going for and it can be very satisfying to get the Perfect combo that you were going for whether it was a bunch of trees or whether you were trying to get a ton of the rabbits or a bunch of the deer or your fifth butterfly that kind of thing that aspect is still great fun rules wise I'll touch a little bit on this in the bad section as well but from a good standpoint it is a pretty smooth game to play I mean the rules you need to know for your turn sequence is draw two cards or play a card that's pretty much it and when playing a card you discard other cards and you might get a bonus if you discard the right symbol well that's pretty much it I mean that is it from a rules perspective keep going until you get the third winter card and again I love that timer mechanic M has it couple of other games I can't recall their titles but you know other games have got this where I think ethnos had it as well I I love this thing where you get warned that the game is going to win soon and as soon as it happens it's almost a bit like hearing the the sudden death music in a Mario game or so you know it's like and then sudden it all speeds up and you're like ah quit get get going it's like that with this as soon as that winter cut comes out you hear the music and then you better get going it's like oh damn I need to play that and get this down give me another deer quick and oh third winter and it's it works so well love it love it love it I don't want to die Mike now of course a big card game that relies on a lot of cards luck is going to be a big factor and certainly it's a present here the problem that everel has where you're constantly having to search for very specific cards is present here with some of these combos some of these combos are pretty straightforward to get a lot of or different ones off the trees in particular there's plenty of them in the deck you find them but then certain other ones where you know the wild BS they score a lot if you can get a squeaker a little baby boar well then you're having to go through the deck and hope a squeaker comes out the the deers in particular you know like you know lyns or something says oh I get 10 points if a row deer comes out well I'm wait till a Road Deer appear somewhere but I'm not going to see it you want to go for five butterflies well you need five different butterflies and you're constantly trying to find that fifth butterfly and that's all based on luck there is no skill in involved in getting end of your bonus really it's just did it appear and did no one else Nick it that's kind of a big deal and certainly you're just going to have to accept that you know despite what skill you might show during the game luck can still screw you over wait my cheating unit malfunction the graphic design is also a little bit on the squinty side these aren't the largest cards in the world and I feel like maybe they should have been a little bit bigger but you got to look for some really tiny icons on here the type of creature it is is a tiny little square the the the type of cost is you know reasonably well it sticks out but the main thing I have problems with is the icon that tells you like whether it gives you a discount on other cards there's a lot of different types of leaves that they use they use different color leaves and the design of the leaves is pretty similar to each other but what's worse and kind of unforgivable is the similarity of the colors the colors are insane I mean a red and a yellow will stick out like a sore fun fine you know a green and a blue will probably stick out fairly well but there's two different types of green a dark green and a slightly lighter green a nugget of purest green there is a blue and a slightly grayer blue yeah there's an orange and then there's a slightly light brown I've repeatedly looked at cards and mistaken them for each other because the symbols are just too small and too similar on the colors if you are color blind I don't recommend you play this game because yes the leaf designs are similar but you're just going to go absolutely nuts trying to look really tightly at these cards to see the different leaf designs and it really isn't best suited on that front the game says two to five players 60 Minutes that 60 Minutes is mostly accurate it can drag on a bit beyond that with a lot of players if there's slow people around but the problem that player scaling has is that this game always does feel it like it goes it drags on a bit too much like it's not the longest game ever but every game I play of this I think it's outstaying it's welcome if I play this with four or five players you've got to wait for multiple other players to take their turn and there's only so much you can plan for particularly as the clearing is going to be pretty chaotic with cards being drawn and played and drawn and played so there's only so much you can plan ahead for and with four or five players especially if you get anybody who's kind of slow you're going to be sat there for a while and you don't get that many you know you don't get that many chances to act in fact you'll have less turns than in a normal game because yeah you scale this deck based on number of players but another 10 cards in or out of the deck doesn't make up for the fact that four other players have got to do something before you do so you know you have that problem with high player counts but then if you switch it up to two or three player especially two player yes you get a lot more turns but again I just feel like when I get to the winter cards or maybe even just before I get to the winter cards you've got so much stuff out here you've got like tree tree tree tree tree B butterfly mold beer bed whatever you know back mizette you know all this stuff out in front of you way too many things to score more on that later but you still haven't seen the first winter card or you might have seen the first winter card and you're waiting for the second and third one to turn up and especially if it happens to be on the very bottom of the deck that gets annoying because by the time the third winter card comes up you feel like the game should have ended a good few like like 10 15 minutes ago well we're waiting but let's get to the big Achilles heel with this game and when I say Achilles heel wow it's as if Achilles has a heal with a giant Target on it and everything that you shoot at it is basically like a homing missile this is a potential killer for this game and it really does kill a lot of it the scoring and I mean this in two aspects firstly the scoring for this game is an absolute chore a massive chore you have got 14 of these reference cards that tell you what all the different creatures score like okay not much Point needing them the graphic design you know for what each animal scores is pretty straightforward on here but oh my word do you have a lot to score by the end of the game not so much in four or five players it's mitigated a bit in that but then of course you've got the problem with not taking many turns in the game dragging on endlessly but in a two-player game especially three player as well you have so much stuff in front of you that trying to score it is problematic and the the pad you know I'll just leave that box there for a minute is not exactly useful on that front because you know you've got trees and then you've got to do the top and the bottom on a single line then you got to do the left and the right on a single line no no no you need to have a score pad with every type of animal on it ideally or at the very minimum Left Right top bottom as individual lines combining them though means that you're writing a bucket load of numbers on here trying to do the mass and the mass gets ridiculous you know you have got to think right how many you know I've got five butterflies that means that's worth 20 okay fine uh but then I've got two other butterflies on top top so that's only worth three okay so 23 okay right I've got deers right that gives me three points for every Green Leaf s on my cards how many are those have I got i' got 1 2 3 4 5 six that's 18 right fine I've got uh four horse chestnut trees that's 16 but then I've also got all eight species on my tree in my thing so that's 10 points for those strawberries uh but then I've also got have I got four beaches in my thing yes I have so each of those are worth five linden tree uh oh you've got more Linden trees than me okay so they're only worth one point a piece uh the Wolves five points for deer right how many points have I how many deer have I got three for I on 20 23 car one oh now I've gone crosseyed I'm an accountant I'm a tax accountant and scoring for this feels like a chore and before you get on my case saying well what about Earth Earth has a lot of scoring Earth's scoring is long winded yes I agree it's a long- winded it's a flaw of the game but it's also a lot more structured and a lot more easier to deal with you know what do I have to deal with first count the points on the cards done right okay now how many cards in your compost done right how many cubes have you got done right how many uh like tree segments have you got done you know they're individual lines they're structured and they easy to count the hardest thing in Earth to score is the terrain cards get past that bit though and everything else is pretty straightforward here though nothing is easy to score there are all sorts of different interlinking things that make that give you points or like deny points or whatever trying to visualize it in this smers board of messy cards with no real structure is just it's painful it takes probably about half the length of the game to score as the game is and this is where BGA comes in because board game arena takes that element away from you and has you visualizing the score at the same time if you are on BGA you don't have to spend 20 minutes scoring the end of the game and you know what scores each player is on because it tells you on screen and I'm the bad guy but it's not just the score in itself the balance the balance in this game is almost at a point that I want to call it broken now that's a strong word to use so we'll avoid using that but there's some consensus online about this and there are some clear things in here that work a lot better than others the trees and deer with the Wolves those three in particular especially trees are easily so far the most powerful thing to do in the game for points if you do deer and wolves and you get the points of these you're going to win if you get a bunch of trees you get eight species you get the horse chestnuts or whatever and all the other cards that seem to stem off how many trees you've got you're going to win it's just a very easy strategy to pull off but it's also a very lucrative one but then there's stuff in here that I will just never play again like ever butterflies you get 20 points if you get all five butterflies you've got to find five different butterflies in the entire deck during a game play them all on five different trees and all you get is 20 points you have a tree called the syamore tree that literally gives you a point per tree and all you've got to do is just play a bunch of trees which you do anyway and if you get multiple sycamores this thing just escalates and compounds but there's a lot of things in here that just don't feel right I mean a bat it's worth five points of there's at least three different bats so again I got to find three different bats or I could simply just play a deer that gives me three points for every Green symbol which I probably got loads off without even realizing it Birds three points for every bird fine okay easy but then you get some other thing that gives you you know 0 10 15 and 20 if you can find 1 2 three or four fireflies which are pretty rare in the deck it's there's just a lot of occasions here where you look at the points for a card and you can just tell at a 5-second glance it's not worth playing it compared to these others which is why if you go online you will see Freds about trees and deer wolves being the most powerful strategies and I think they always are if anybody in any of the games I've played does one of those two Str strategies and makes it work it wins with hands down you can't do any other strategy in this game and beat it it just hasn't happened now you're getting a variety of things you're not just getting those animals you're going to have to play other things as well but there's a good you know three or four different things in this game like you know species wise that I'm just never going to touch and that's removing you know past the victory it's making some cards almost dead draws I mean you know I don't really care about butterflies and really care about bats I don't really care about half the plants unless I'm going for a lot of trees and they work with them the BS not really worth it you've got a cave you've got a cave where you can put Cards into your cave and they become a point each but it requires you to have a lot of cards in the clearing with the bear or a lot of cards in your hand for the raccoon and and you might get five or six maybe from it but then you lose all the cards in your hand which is never a great thing but then it just doesn't feel that lucrative I get five points per Gat yeah but this thing gives me a three points per bird you know the birds are much more common in your gats anything with a multiplayer is infinitely better to get and it just really makes the balance of this game a bit off-kilter so for a shuffle I am seeing a lot of people give this praise saying it's like their best game of the year like it's their favorite card game and all that stuff and loads of people on comments have said I really love Forest Shuffle and there are a few that don't but the majority are saying oh I love this game but here's the thing a lot of those people have played this on board game arena I'm not rating this based on board game arena I'm rating it based on the card game physical copy that I have in front of me so board game arena doesn't give it extra brownie points all right but also I think a lot of people a lot of channels are just ignoring the scoring part they sort of gloss over and go oh yeah it takes a while to score and that's it they don't say the fact that it takes an eternity to score they don't mention anything about the player skap issue they mention nothing about the fact that some of these paths to Victory are definitely more powerful than others it you know they just kind of omit this and I can't I can't overlook this so I have a card game here that looks amazing I love it on the table and it has some very satisfying combo building but the thing is is that I'm going to want to build the same combo every game because I know it's the most powerful and I'm not going to want to play this that often because I know that when I get to the scoring phase I'm going to have to go through a massive you know massive lesson to get it all done for 15 minutes and with five players especially if you got a couple of people who aren't very good at counting oh my word it is you know painful you know because I can score my own thing but then if I've got to go and score your lot as well I basically will jump out the window and exactly how many times did he fall out of the window and with no solo mode either I can't even play this by myself which would eliminate some of that player problem but there's no AI or anything to play against so I have to play this with other players do I play it with more and have less turns in a long drawn out game or do I play it with two and have some dominant strategies while also still outstanding it's welcome it just there's no real sweet spot maybe free player is the absolute sweet spot but when you're scaling from two to 5 I don't expect to have to hunt down only fre players for this game or go online because I don't want to play the physical card game version I'm giving it overall a 6 out of 10 6 out of 10 is above average and still decent there's a lot of stuff in here to does do well the look the card play the giving stuff to your opponents the combo building is all really good fun but the player scaling is all over the shop the scoring is an absolute chore which I'm going to have to suffer through every game and the whole balance of these cards I feel just should have been spotted in game development I can't see how people played this and thought that all of these different creatures were balanced no way and a lot of channels are omitting this information when they talk about this game and I think that's a disservice to to the consumer I'm going to tell it how it is and despite a lot of good stuff about this game those problems are big problems this could have easily been a nine possibly a 10 out of 10 card game potentially with the good stuff that was going for it if they just got everything else right unfortunately their big knocks drops it down to a six if you're playing this on board game arena though I think this actually climbs to a seven you know at least a seven and could be recommended but I feel like I don't want to have this card game version anymore I'll just play it on BG a and that's not good when you're trying to recommend it to people to buy so that's it for me on this episode of the broken me if you like what you see then please thumb it up on YouTube and thumb it up on Board Game Geek when it goes live on the site don't forget to check out all the other SM reviews I'm doing let me know your comments down below but please be civil because I know I've just angered a ton of You by saying that this game is flawed and has issues and isn't even getting a seal of endorsement from me but hey can you deny the flaws I've said you probably will but as I say let's let's hear your thoughts in the comments and let me know because I know there's some people who don't like this game I know there's fans of it everywhere it's going to be interesting to see what happens when this goes live so take care and remember regardless of how arduous you want your scoring phases to be it's still only a game here goes nothing bye for [Music] now

Channel: The Broken Meeple

Views: 9,411

Keywords: forest shuffle board game review, Board Games, Dice Tower Network, Luke Hector, Broken Meeple, Gaming, Reviews, Podcast, Top 10, Games, tom vasel, boardgamegeek, playthrough, top ten, cull, preview, gamer, forest shuffle, forest shuffle board game, forest shuffle card game, forest shuffle broken meeple, forest shuffle dice tower, forest shuffle review, forest shuffle broken meeple review

Id: JO0ClX1r5sQ

Length: 24min 32sec (1472 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023