Designed by: Paolo Mori
Rustling Leaves is a roll-and-write game for one to six (-or more!) players that takes players on a walk through the forests, crossing off areas they see and scoring points in a variety of ways.
It really is a variety, as the game’s large pad of game sheets – each player gets one, and they’re filled in separately – comes in four separate seasons that each score in different ways. The heart of the game, however, is always the same: two dice are rolled with numbers 1-4. The combined result is the area players must cross off that many squares on their sheet: if I roll a four and a two, we all cross out an area of 4×2 squares (or 2×4: orientation is up to you).
When an area is crossed out, you choose one element to score in it. Continuing our example above, your area might contain five trees and you cross them out to score five points. I might cross out the same area, or a different one, and score trees as well. But I might decide to score bees instead, hoping later to score flowers as the two things will combine to score me points. Someone else might score birds, who also work in tandem. Everyone tries to avoid crossing out bears, because you get points for leaving them alone!
And so it continues until players – perhaps at different times – elect to stop playing, as rolling numbers you can’t (or choose not to) use costs you negative points. Everyone has a joker to play though, where they can change a rolled number to whatever they like for their personal board, and the dice also occasionally roll clouds, which have effects on what scores points and what doesn’t. It’s a pretty simple game, though, where the rules change a little from season to season but the decisions are always tricky!
Very little, although in some seasons there are rewards for being the first to achieve something.
Low to moderate - play is simultaneous and each turn is simply a matter of deciding what to cross off...
...but there's the rub, as whatever you choose to score inevitably deprives you of other opportunities and strategies at the same time
There is a gentle more-ishness to the game, although once you've played all four seasons the difference in play is of the tactical variety, with a side-helping of luck-pushing
1-6
Players
8+
Years
5-15
Mins
Sam says
A prettily-presented, cleverly designed thing where I find myself ending most plays wondering where I went wrong, and how I could have mitigated the dice-rolling a little better. That's preferable - to me - over a game that feels easily-solved, though, and I appreciate the tricky choices designer Paolo Mori has folded into an otherwise fairly innocent-looking undertaking. It's a little too solitary and sedate for me to get really excited about, but I've enjoyed a few plays of Rustling Leaves for it's own particular brand of bucolic flavour.