‘Living Forest’ Board Game Review
When a game wins the Kennerspiel Des Jahres award, it has to be taken seriously. This prestigious prize has been awarded annually for eleven years now, but it was spawned from the original Spiel Des Jahre award which has now ran for more than forty years. The purpose of the Kennerspiel award is to identify games that have systems and mechanics that will appeal to more experienced gamers, whilst still retaining mass appeal. Previous winners include Wingspan, The Quacks of Quedlinburg and 7 Wonders, but this year – the prize went to a little-known title from Ludonaute known as Living Forest.
Living Forest is a mixed bag of deck-building, set collection and tile placement/engine building which is themed around the idea of protecting a sacred forest from an evil fire spirit called Onibi. Each player occupies the role of a nature spirit who must gather guardian animals, plant sacred trees and put out the fires set by Onibi – with the first player to complete one of the three victory conditions twelve times triggering the end of the game. I’ll explain more on this later, but in a nutshell, Living Forest is basically a race to put out twelve fires, plant twelve trees or play a turn in which twelve sacred flowers show among your board and the cards you play.
Living Forest is actually quite simple to play, and the objectives are quite clear, however, it is not an easy game to teach simply because of how much is going on, and to a lesser extent because the instruction manual has not been converted into English as well as I might have hoped. Essentially, the game is split into three phases per turn, the first of which is simply for players to simultaneously draw cards from their deck until they choose to stop – or until three “solitary” symbols are shown across all animals. The other symbols on these cards will be used to power the next phase of the turn, but it’s important to note that if you do draw three solitary symbols, you will only get one action in the main phase – if you stop at one or two, you can have two actions.
At this point, the game reverts to traditional turn order beginning with whoever has the sacred tree standee, and the action (or actions, in most cases) that you will then perform are as follows – choose one or more guardian animals to add to your deck (by spending suns), plant a maximum of one sacred tree (based on your tree-shoot symbols), put out Onibi’s fires (based on your water symbols) or finally, move forward a number of spaces on the Circles of Spirits board and trigger the action shown. As an aside, one of my issues with the manual is that the final (Circle of Spirits) action reads a bit like a bonus (third action) but I don’t think it is, just in case anyone else has an issue there.
So, Guardian animals provide icons which then drive the other actions, basically, and you’ll want to add new animals to your deck because they are generally more powerful than those you begin with. The most powerful of all are those solitary animals that I mentioned earlier, who usually have multiple high-value symbols. The downside of course is that if you draw three, then you kind of bust and have to drop down from two actions to one. This isn’t always a disaster, but unless the game state demands that you achieve one particular thing and you need to keep drawing to do so, it is generally better to do two actions over one. This mechanic was first used in Mystic Vale, and when you went bust in that game, you basically lost your entire turn. Thankfully, there are also gregarious animals who have a symbol which can cancel out one solitary symbol – but these cards provide fewer other symbols.
Planting trees (which are placed on a board in front of each player) will also result in additional symbols, or one-time bonuses. Every tree has its own symbol (adding water, sun or whatever) and when a row or column is complete, additional symbols are also added. All of these count towards the total (alongside those on guardian animal cards) when resolving actions. If you can get trees to cover corner spaces, then you will gain an immediate bonus such as a shard (which can also be obtained via the Circle of Spirits.) Shards allow the players to return a solitary animal to their discard pile or to remove a (bad) fire spirit card from their deck, so can be quite useful.
Water can be used to battle fire – which collects in the Circle of Spirits at the end of each turn. A player can take however many water symbols they have and remove fire tokens (which may show values of two, three and four) they can afford to pay, receiving no change if they cannot make a perfect match. Bearing in mind that one way to end the game is to collect twelve fire tokens, low cost fire tokens are in high demand – these tokens regenerate based on how many cards a player takes from the guardian animal rows, so by taking better cards, you actually make fire tokens available for the player (or possibly players) who follow.
Sometimes, Onibi will attack a player directly – if that player has not generated enough water to exceed the value of all tokens still in the central circle. In this case, any differential must be taken in fire spirit cards, which are all solitary and add no beneficial symbols. The only way to mitigate these cards is via either a gregarious animal or by using a shard to discard them. Fire spirits are really bothersome and can really slow your deck down, so in general between the risk of picking these cards up and the benefit of taking fire tokens, gathering and using water tends to be a reasonable focus area for any player who has the chance.
As you can possibly imagine, there’s a lot going on in Living Forest and the best way to learn it really is to dive in and play a round or two – either resetting after or just carrying on. Somehow, for all the different mechanisms at play, it doesn’t actually feel convoluted. The simultaneous playing of cards, the relatively mild consequences if you bust and the not-too-bad downside of having to take a fire spirit card or two all keep the game feeling fast and fairly light, so even if there are some “big game” mechanics at work, Living Forest feels only a little heavier than your average gateway game.
This is also a lovely production. Living Forest features two nice token holders for all the trees, and the central board and standees match the theme really well. The stand out component though is probably the set of guardian animal cards, which features a whole host of beautifully serene creatures who all emit an element of bio-luminescence. Many of these have cute characteristics and a kind of charm that makes them extremely appealing to look at in detail, and whilst the theme could have applied in space, or a medieval village or more or less anywhere else, the overall forest aesthetic is lovely.
Whilst I still think Living Forest is a bit of an odd choice for the Kennerspiel because of the fact that it is more of a mash-up of existing ideas than a new, killer mechanism, there is a relaxed, charming feel to Living Forest that just ties everything together nicely. Even though you’re facing down several core mechanisms, there’s never really a feeling of stress or concern to the decisions – sure, you might wish you could take three actions instead of two sometimes, but there is a sense of being almost constantly rewarded. Living Forest feels quite generous in terms of how it plays, and as such it also ends quite quickly – and often players will want to dive straight back in. It’s hard to find a recommendation higher than that!
