Canopy
Designed by: Tim Eisner
Canopy is a 2-4 player game that’s probably best for two: the more players there are the more arbitrary it can feel. It’s essentially a game of set-collection: grabbing what cards you can to create sets of matching plants and animals, and growing trees that you score by capping them with the titular canopies.
The large deck of Rainforest cards is split into three new growth piles, each one representing a season (or in game terms, a round). Before we start, three piles are dealt from the first season, face-down: 1 card, 2 cards and 3 cards. These piles represent your options on your turn: you look at the smallest pile first and choose whether to take it or not. If you don’t, you look at the next pile and repeat this decision. Each time you elect not to take a pile, it gets a new card added to it from the deck. You don’t get to see what it is, and you can never go back and choose a previous pile! If you reject the first two new growth piles you must either take the third, or as a last resort you can instead draw a single card from the top of the deck. You must keep all your cards!
The cards are laid out on the table in front of you. At the end of the season – when the current deck is emptied – your plants will score for each set (this can include negative points, depending on how many you have) and weather cards (Sun and Rain) score when combined (- they’re worth nothing without each other) as well as any completed trees – trees without a canopy score nothing. Both plants and weather are discarded after being scored. Animal cards won’t score until the end of the third and final season, meaning you have plenty of time to gather them. Each animal comes in pairs: both are worth points, but they are worth more as a pair, and one will give you a special bonus: the sloth, for instance, lets you draw two cards from the deck instead of one if you reject all three new growth piles. Finally, seeds let you draw from the Seed deck, which contains pretty much the same things as the rainforest deck but can be a kind of gamble just before scoring at the end of each season.
Except… as in real life, the rainforest is under threat, here in the form of the threat cards: fire, drought, and disease. Fire and disease cards force you to lose plant and animal cards, and drought cards force the loss of any card you choose. That’s it!
The rules change slightly for 3-4 players
Sam says
Love the theme and the fact the game contains no plastics, and it looks lovely. I like the sense of luck-pushing as you’re forced to consider rejecting cards that look okay in favour of a bunch that *might* be better. It’s a nice two-player undertaking that plays out at a decent lick in 30 minutes, a little less once you’re familiar. My reservations are entirely subjective in that I basically feel the different ways to score under the hood is not all that compelling. There is a smidgen of interaction though, and as a puzzle game with a frisson of risk in the card selection, I would happily play it again.
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Take That!
A little, in the drought cards. More really from your own decisions occasionally backfiring, or the passive-aggressive snatching of cards you know your opponent wants.
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Fidget Factor!
Low!
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Brain Burn!
Low enough to be enjoyable without being trifling. It's a game of sensing opportunities and looking for combinations.
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Again Again!
Canopy isn't going to feel markedly different from play to play, but it'll always present a gentle, tactical challenge, with elements of unpredictability.
