Living Forest

In Living Forest, players are the spirits of the forest seeking to protect the trees – and themselves – from the antagonist spirit Onibi. During a number of rounds, you’ll play animal cards to take actions, furthering your progress towards victory. But crucially, there are three different ways to win…

Each player has a starting deck of cards that you’ll shuffle. In every round, players will first (simultaneously, although for your first few rounds you may want to take it in turns) draw cards one at a time from your deck before choosing how to use them. The card-drawing has a luck-pushing aspect: some animal cards are solitary, and if you draw a three solitary animals you must stop, and can only take a single action this round. However, if you stop drawing cards before a third solitary animal appears, you can take two actions instead: and how powerful your actions are is defined by the cards you’ve drawn: each card has symbols on it for suns, trees, water and sacred flowers.

So what are the actions? One of them is to buy more powerful cards and place them on top of your deck, ready to be drawn in the next round: this is exceedingly helpful, as better cards give you better turns. Another is to put out the fire Onibi has started in the forest – visible on a shared board – and taking the fire tokens for yourself. You can plant trees on your own board, which give you future benefits as well, or move your player piece along the shared path on the forest, taking the action of whatever space you stop on. If you pass another player during this movement, you can steal victory tokens from them, representing fire, trees, or a sacred flower.

The purpose of these multiple options are twofold: putting out – or at least managing – the fire in the forest prevents you (and others) from adding sacred flower cards to your deck, which are both solitary (ie unhelpful) and lacking in any benefits as well. The cards and trees increase your power on subsequent rounds. But most of all, these are the avenues to victory: if you collect twelve fire tokens or twelve different kinds of tree, you win. The third possible victory is via the sacred flowers – if you manage to play twelve of these symbols on a single turn, that is the final way to triumph.

At the end of each round any players who don’t have enough water symbols on their cards to negate the fire are forced to add sacred flower cards, and then more fire tokens are added for the next round.