Theme: Nature

Rewild: South America

Rewild: South America is a unique, medium-weight, card-driven, engine-building board game for nature enthusiasts with a heart for wildlife that can be enjoyed in 45-60 minutes.

The thematic focus of Rewild is on the fauna and flora of the South American ecoregions Caatinga, Gran Chaco, Cerrado, Pantanal, Amazon rainforest and Atlantic rainforest. These 6 ecoregions and all their inhabitants exhibit diverse interrelationships and dependencies. One of the core concerns of game author Bruno Liguori Sia, who lives in Brazil himself, was to depict and convey this complex network in a game.

In terms of game mechanics, Rewild has a straightforward foundation. On their turn, each player plays a card and chooses one of two depicted actions. After carrying out this action, the player can attract animals and plants on display to their ecosystem. As soon as a player has 8 (or 9) face-up animal cards in front of them, the end of the game is triggered.

However, you shouldn't be fooled by this essentially simple basis, as every game of Rewild features countless decisions and plays differently every time due to the enormous variety of cards. Questions that players are faced with include:
How do I generate enough resources (water, minerals, seeds) to expand my ecosystem? Where do I place which biomes so that their effects optimally promote the expansion of my ecosystem? Do I focus on one biome or several? Would it make sense to upgrade my existing biomes?
When do I get all my action cards back into my hand to have more options and resources available again? Do I do this once, twice or even three times and what are my opponents planning? Will I still have enough time to play all my cards in time for them to count towards the effects of my animal cards?
Which animal and plant cards do I bring into my ecosystem to create an optimally linked ecosystem that generates as many victory points as possible? Are there any cards with immediate effects that would be interesting for a retrigger? Do I keep an animal species until the end, or do I immediately generate points by making it the target of a predator?
The player who best answers and masters all these questions in a game of Rewild receives the most victory points and wins the game.

Aspens

Aspens is a quick-playing strategy board game for two players, where you harness the wind and sun and carefully balance growth with expansion to outgrow and outwit your loved ones.

In Aspens, players compete to grow the largest forest on a shared board - having to balance how much they invest in building their "engine" to increase the odds of generating trees on future turns, with the pressure of needing to expand to claim territory and ultimately be crowned the winner.

Players start by seeding and growing a forest space adjacent to each water tile. This is where players determine their initial strategy and appetite for risk. Then play begins.

On your turn, you roll the sun die, and BOTH players generate trees for spaces they have grown tall enough to capture the sun. Then you roll the wind die, determining which directions you can grow outward in. The active player then plants their trees, balancing between growing existing spaces UP with more trees, or expanding OUTWARD from their forests, following the wind. This is the core crux of tough decision making and strategy comes in - balancing future investment with rapid expansion.

Play continues until all spaces are claimed, and the player with the most spaces is crowned the winner!

Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor

Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor is a stand-alone game within the Forest Shuffle family and introduces a brand new habitat and features new species with new abilities and bonuses to explore. As in the earlier original Forest Shuffle, in Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor players compete to build the most valuable environment by placing trees and shrubs, then attracting species to these locations to create an ecologically balanced habitat for flora and fauna.

What's new in Dartmoor is the introduction of TERRAIN cards that are played horizontally and serve as a home or feeding ground for different species than trees or shrubs. Due to the nature of the terrain, species can only be placed above and below a terrain card. Deer and other species stay clear from bogs or peat areas in the moorland. They need their drink, but won't feel safe at dwells or next to rivulets. So players have to be watch out, where to place their species.

Like its predecessor, Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor comes with a unique back side: Each of the 180 cards of the deck can be placed face down, creating a bog, if the action allows it. The caves in Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor now will be drafted at the beginning of the game and offer asymmetrical starting conditions. On top, the number of tree symbols has been reduced from eight to six to enable bonuses more easily.

The game mechanism stays untouched: To start, each player has six cards in hand, with cards depicting either a particular type of tree, shrub or terrain or two moor dwellers (animal, plants), with these latter cards being divided in half, whether vertically or horizontally, with one dweller in each card half. On a turn, either draw two cards — whether face down from the deck or face up from the clearing — and add them to your hand, or play a card from your hand by discarding other cards to pay the cost, then putting that first card into play. In the end, the player with the highest score wins.

HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest

Step into a world of wonder and natural splendor with HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest, an immersive family game inspired by the Indonesian word for rainforest.

In HUTAN, all players have their own rainforest patch where they will plant sprouts and flowers that over time grow into towering trees. When a habitat is created, an iconic forest animal arrives: the orangutan, the sumatran tiger, the rhinoceros hornbill, the cassowary, or the sumatran rhino.

HUTAN plays over nine rounds, and all players have two turns each round. On your turn, you take a flower card from the shared market pool and place the flowers into your rainforest. If you place a flower on top of a matching flower, you grow a tree. When an area is completed with trees, the last tree is replaced by an animal.

At the end of the game, the player who grew the best rainforest and attracted the most animals will score the most points and win.

—description from the publisher

Undergrove

For over 300 million years, trees have traded nutrients with fungi in a vast underground network. Scientists continue to make new discoveries about this hidden world.

In Undergrove, you are a towering evergreen with an ancient symbiotic connection to the fungi in your forest. As new mushrooms appear, your options expand for converting nutrients and helping your seedlings. Using cube conversion, tile placement, area control, and a tiny bit of engine building, you’ll need to claim the most advantageous locations and optimize your actions to leave the best legacy in the forest. The player with the greatest number of successful seedlings, wins!

● Build a shared forest containing mushrooms with diverse abilities.
● Trade with the mushrooms to get resources based on the partnerships you’ve made.
● Place your seedings in the most advantageous positions to score the most points.

Inspired by real mycorrhizal trading networks. Shape the destiny of your forest with every decision!

-description from publisher