Ludonaute | Living Forest | Board Game | Ages 10+ | 2-4 Players | 40 Minutes Playing Time

Product Information

Plant one Protective Tree – Using your green sprout points, buy a tile and place it on your board adjacent to a previously placed tile. Each tile instantly provides you extra elements or perhaps the ability to perform the same action twice. If you fill a row or column, you will get an additional bonus for that. If you plant a tree in the corner, you will get the immediate one-time bonus shown in that space. Absolument magnifique, le jeu nous embarque dans son univers original au cours de parties plutôt rapides pour un tel jeu. Plant one and only one Protective Tree: Add up the amount of leaves and take one, and only one, Protective Tree for a total cost equal to or lower than your number of leaves. By placing a Protective Tree on specific corners you gain a specific extra Action. Once all players have finished drawing their cards, the guardian Animals phase ends and you can move on to the Action phase. You win the game by planting 12 different protective trees, or by collecting 12 sacred flowers to awaken Sanki, or by putting out 12 fires to permanently repel Onibi.

The production value and artwork in Living Forest are without a doubt gorgeous – the colours are so vibrant on the table. Having said that, the player tokens don’t stay on their little stands very well (but that’s just a minor niggle). The rule book also has some nice examples of actions and phases and is pretty easy to follow.Whilst we will do everything we can to meet the delivery times above, there may be factors outside of our control and we cannot guarantee delivery within this time frame. As mentioned previously Living Forest: Kodama increases the required wining conditions to 13. BUT when all the Kodama of a particular type have been removed the winning condition of that particular spirit is increased to 15. This means if someone appears to be racing towards victory you can attract these Kodama to make the finishing post stretch off into the distance. The strength of the action is determined by the number of elements visible on the Guardian Animal cards in your help line, and on your forest board. If your Help Line shows 3 solitary symbols (not canceled by gregarious symbols), you can then perform only 1 Action.

Then, as I wrote a game session for our internal OG mailing list, a huge amount of discussion popped up. Lots of people threw around the word “fragile” about the game; but interestingly, there were many different conclusions as to what was so fragile about it. One writer said that their group felt the Spiral strategy was superior – as you could almost always generate the action you needed by moving on the circle. Another replied with: “ Fire seemed much too easy to end and win the game with. Fire will happen no matter what, maybe there needs to be a different end value for the fire tokens? I mean it wasn’t even close. There is no way the guys could have won with trees.” You can find both the solitary and gregarious symbol in the top left corner of a Guardian Animals card. So, Living Forest has been one of the more thought provoking games I’ve come across in 2022. And, I’m honestly not sure yet if that’s a good or bad thing! As soon as we finished our first game, my group (in our usual post mortem) discussed what we thought about the game. We concluded that after our first game, we were worried that the tree building strategy was the best as we didn’t see any way to stop it. There wasn’t really much your opponents could do to prevent this from happening, and thus, it was a superior strategy. It made us worry about the long term replayability of the game. The box comes complete with a solo mode which sadly I haven’t had time to fully explore, but looks pretty comprehensive with difficulty being easy to adjust. After seeing the varied responses to my initial internal mini review, I was definitely interested in playing it again, and being more aware to the situational nature of the strategy, it most certainly played differently. I tried for the fire strategy myself, but I was definitely denied extra fire tokens near the end of the game – the other players simply stopped buying cards; so I could set myself up for fire tokens occasionally, and otherwise a few fell in my lap due to the autorefill if things were empty – but it was not a runaway strategy by any means.You can keep drawing Guardian cards, but if you reveal 3 Guardians with ” solitary” symbols printed on them in a row, you must stop. A “gregarious” or “neutral” symbol will cancel out a solitary symbol. You can use any Lotus tiles you have acquired to discard a card just revealed with a solitary symbol card to enable you to keep drawing if you like. Living forest has multiple paths to victory and quite a few mechanics in play. Having played several times now, I gravitate towards collecting protective trees more than other actions. I like the spatial puzzle element. The permanent and immediate bonuses they offer give an advantage that strengthens as the game goes on. And there’s no downside to planting. They are miniature, natural engines. Plant a protective tree – if your Guardian Animals awarded you any plant points i.e. visible in your Help Line, you can buy a tree tile and place it on your board. The placement must be adjacent to a previously planted one. Every tree gives you permanent elements and/or a bonus action. Plus, filling rows, columns get you added permanent rewards (with corners offering an immediate one-off boon!).

At no player count is this a particularly heavy strategy game, but it’s potentially fun if you want board games for families and friends. You may find it’s a tiny bit complicated to explain, though, with all the little moving parts, none of which will feel familiar to people who’ve only encountered mass market games. They will, however, probably enjoy the production values with the curious little tree dispensers and the blank-eyed spirit animals striking just the right balance between cute and scarily mystical. Overall - should you buy Living Forest?Each turn has 3 phases and up to 2 actions to perform. Your main task is to choose the winning way! Phase 1: Guardian Animals Each turn you reveal your Guardian Animal cards one by one, trying to get the best combination of elements possible to perform your two actions. Be careful, if three Lone Animals are played, you can only perform one. If you’ve drawn a Gregarious symbol, this cancels one Solitary symbol in your Help Line. They’re trying to keep the social critter gathering going. Their function is to counter-balance the moody, emo-teenager Solitary animals. This means by drawing a Gregarious card, you could go on to draw three Solitary cards, and keep going. But draw a fourth, and boom: you have to stop. Draw two Gregarious cards and you have to stop when you draw your fifth Solitary card, and so on.