Woodcraft

In Woodcraft, you are woody craftspeople, harvesting wood and using it to make wooden articles like chairs, toolboxes, treasure chests and so on. But despite the cutesy appearance and bucolic theme, it’s actually a fairly complex undertaking. You won’t end up with splinters, but you may need a nice cup of tea to recover…

In each game there are 14 rounds and in each round, you usually take a single action. The actions are many, and involve buying or exchanging lumber (represented by dice), buying woodcrafting materials like glue or woodsaws, hiring Helpers to improve your turn-by-turn capabilities, planting trees (which grow at the start of each subsequent round) or making improvements to your workshop, which is represented by your own player board. Here you house your helpers and store your lumber, as well as blueberries (essentially money) and any other things such as tools. You also have your orders here, and this give you direction in the game, because fulfilling orders is kind of a primary objective: an order might want three dice (lumber, remember!) some wood glue and a woodsaw. Once you have all that stuff you can instantly complete the order and gain the rewards – usually, blueberries and points. But it’s a little complicated because the lumber comes in three distinct types – green, yellow, brown – and not only do the different colours have different values when you buy and sell them, the orders will demand a specific colour in a specific number: for instance to make a picture frame I need brown dice values 5 and 3, green dice value 1 and some wood glue as well. So, when I’m taking actions I’m looking to gather that stuff as quickly as possible; not only so I can then move onto my next order, but also because orders are more valuable the quicker you complete them.

Let’s return to the actions, because how they are selected is also a little ornate. Usually you can take any one of the seven basic actions: they are represented by action tiles laid out on a shared ‘action wheel’ board that has a rotating disc at its centre. Taking one means simply choosing that action tile and moving it on to the next quadrant. Each action tile has what it does represented pictorially on it. But the way the action board works means action tiles that sit unchosen for longer begin to accrue bonuses, so the game isn’t just about looking at your orders to see what you need, it’s also about timing; about seeing what the optimal move is on a given turn that might be better for you in the long run.

So the wheel itself has a tactical feel, but the game also offers strategic paths: if you’re generating a lot of cash you can actually use it to buy points. If you gather a lot of helpers you might be doing less order fulfilment in the early game, but building an ‘engine’ for some spectacular progress in the later rounds. When the 14th round is played to it’s conclusion, the player with the most points wins.