Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor
- Board's Eye View
- 11 minutes ago
- 2 min read
We featured the original Forest Shuffle and its expansions earlier this year on Board's Eye View. Tho' expansions are usually welcomed to add extra dimensions to a popular game they do risk introducing negative consequences. The more cards you add to the deck, the less likely you are to pull the specific combos you need; and if you take a random number of cards out of the core game deck so that the expansion doesn't add to the deck size then the cards you were hoping for may not even be in the game! New cards can also skew strategies. Putting out eight different varieties of tree was quite challenging in the core game but you can do it without even breaking into a sweat if you've shuffled in the expansions. Lookout Games are obviously wise to this dilemma, which is why they've brought us Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor.
Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor is not an expansion and it's not combinable with any of the Forest Shuffle expansions. Rather it's a way of pressing the reset button. It's a standalone game that plays like the original but, because it has a different set of cards, it opens up new potential combos and strategies. Its trees function similarly to those in the original game but Dartmoor introduces shrubs, similar to the trees, and moorlands - cards that are played in landscape mode. Whereas the trees and shrubs can have flora and fauna added above, below and to the left and right of the card, the moorland cards only take flora and fauna above and below - tho' they each take two cards above and two cards below. The reverse side of each card shows a moor, and there are circumstances when a card can be flipped to be played on its moorland side.
On the face of it, the animal population of Dartmoor is rather less exotic than the fauna of the original game but the various cards offer exciting new synergies to discover. The board now clearly delineates the 10 spaces for cards, so you're much less likely to forget to discard the row when 10 cards have been played there. There's also the option of playing with asymmetric caves, tho' these mostly just give you an extra card at the start of the game or a few extra points at the end so they don't make much of a difference.
If, like us, you love Forest Shuffle, the key plus for Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor is that it eliminates the orginal game's expansionitis and lets you explore new strategies and combos. And if you don't have the original then Dartmoor is a good entry point.
