Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor

Just a shorter addition to yesterday's post, reviewing board games from my Essen Spiel 2025 haul. After playing Recall, we finished the afternoon with a game of Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor. Dartmoor is a stand-alone new version of Forest Shuffle, a card game that has been highly successful over the last two years. In all versions of Forest Shuffle you play cards that represent a habitat for other plants or animals, like trees, bushes, or in the new game moorland terrain. You can then play cards for those other plants and animals around those habitats. Most cards score some victory points, and who has the highest score at the end wins the game.

The Forest Shuffle games are a mix of luck and strategy. You can spend your turn drawing two cards, either blind from the stack, or picking up cards other players discarded. Many cards you want to play then have a cost of discarding other cards, with some cards giving bonuses when the discarded cards have the right color. What you are trying to do is to play cards that have synergies with each other. For example there are cards that give victory points for every bird you have in your habitats, or cards that allow you to draw a card every time you play a bird. If you have those, then bird cards become rather valuable for you, and you'll want to pick up the bird cards another player might have discarded, because for him they were of no use.

One flaw in this is that if you play against experienced players, they'll see what cards you need, and avoid discarding those. There are also tricks like discarding cards when the discard row is nearly full, at which point they will be permanently removed before the next player can pick them up. Unfortunately that means that if you play against less casual players, your chance of picking up a discarded card that is really good for you is slim, which then means that the game becomes more about luck, and less about strategy. The other big flaw of the Forest Shuffle games is that counting all the points at the end is a lot of work. Some people even developed apps to count the points faster, but those don't necessarily speed up the process all that much.

Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor is a game I would certainly recommend if you don't have any other Forest Shuffle game yet. The rules aren't much more complicated than the original, and the balance of cards is better. In the original Forest Shuffle, the player drawing two wolves or more won most of the time, while certain other strategies were much inferior. The expansions to the original Forest Shuffle somewhat diluted the wolf problem, but didn't solve it completely. In Dartmoor it is a lot harder to say which is the best strategy. Dartmoor is also a good game if you have already played a lot of the original Forest Shuffle and want more variety.