Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7577252/canopy-evergreen

Designer: Tim Eisner
Publisher: Weird City Games
Artist: Vincent Dutrait

Canopy: Evergreen is an interesting card-based action selection and tableau building game about creating a forest ecosystem. Each turn, players select from stacks of cards and all cards from the selected stack are added to their personal tableau. Every player also has a player board they are growing trees on to unlock bonus tokens, and they have the ability to spend food to acquire helpful animal spirits. At the end of the game, the player with the most points wins.

For the record, I’m not going to give a detailed explanation of setup or gameplay. I’ll explain some as we go, but the main things to know are that you want to build tall trees on your player board and you want them to connect to get bonus tokens, there are stacks of cards you choose from to add cards to your tableau, different cards score in unique ways, and once you’ve passed on a pile, a card gets added and you can’t go back to it.

Let me start out with some things I enjoy about this game! First off, the componentry is lovely, and the 3D trees you get to construct are really neat. There is also a fabulous storage solution provided in the box that fits everything very well! The artwork is also gorgeous with nice, vibrant colors that provide the game, when paired with the trees, with a really wonderful table presence. I also have to say this game is decently thematic. The animals play a solid part in that, as do the trees, and all the cards are forest organisms or different resources needed for plant growth. I specifically enjoy the sun and rain elements that are very thematic and one of my favorite scoring conditions in the game.

In terms of the mechanics, there are some interesting and original gameplay mechanisms that are worth mentioning. The main actions of the game revolve around going through the card stacks and selecting which to take to add to your tableau. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game similar to this one in this capacity where a card from the draw deck gets added when a pile gets skipped, and that there’s no backtracking to stacks you’ve already seen. It adds a fun push your luck element while also playing strongly into action selection. The animals are also a plus for me; they have good variety, but more importantly, there’s an innovative three card concept here. Each animal type has three cards in the deck and each of those three cards are unique. One of the cards provides a scoring condition for the end of each round (there are three rounds in the game), one gives the player a once-per-round ability, and the last affords end of game points. I like that each has its own benefit and that there’s only one of each for every animal in the deck.

Continually, there are two advanced variants included in the box that incorporate different wildlife ecosystem tokens and a Shifting Season card module. I honestly haven’t tried the special wildlife tokens yet, but I did give Shifting Seasons a try (solo of course). In my opinion, this module isn’t super useful for solo play, but I could see it being fun in a multiplayer game. The cards do add some creative variety without making the game more rules heavy.

Another interesting aspect of the game is that after each round, your tableau gets discarded, and you restart the next round. I appreciate that they tried to do something different, but one of my favorite aspects of a tableau builder is the growth that happens over the course of the game. Since you start over each round, the puzzle is a little less satisfying for me in that regard.

I need to complain about the solo mode for a second. I do appreciate the ease of facilitation for the opposing fox spirit overall, but why does the player have to make decisions for the fox?! The rulebook provides guidelines for these choices, but it’s quite obnoxious to have to spend time and brainpower looking at the options and selecting the one(s) most beneficial for your opponent. The fox spirit is also a bit of a weird entity in the game that’s relevant and not relevant at the same time and can also do well very easily. For example, in the solo game, the animals that provide that one time ability are significantly less powerful because when those are added to a stack, the spirit treats it as though it has one less card and so therefore almost never takes that stack. Also, I didn’t feel like the spirit was affected much by the inclusion of the animal token abilities, so I had little desire to spend the time figuring out when to play which animal because it almost didn’t really matter.

I will admit there are some interesting decisions revolving around when to take which pile and which pile to select based on the cards and their combination with your existing (or non-existent) tableau, but other than maybe selecting animals, there isn’t much strategically to this game. I know I started this review by saying it’s a card-based tableau builder with action selection, but it’s almost more of a push your luck game with some action selection and partial continually restarting tableau building.

In the same vein, I feel like there is some serious luck in this game that can really make or break the outcome. For example, there was one game where the fox managed to get both pinecones in the same round (allows the player to select bonus cards), so not only did I not get either, but then I had to go through the process of deciding which cards the fox would most benefit from. Also, after a few games, the turns (at least in the solo game) felt pretty samey. You’re always trying to do similar things and there isn’t enough variety in the plant cards to make each game feel unique or like a game of discovery. The tableau reset doesn’t help with this either as each round feels repetitive since you’re starting with a blank slate.

All this said, I would like to try this game multiplayer because I think it could play differently, and it would assuredly be more interactive as both players will be playing animal spirits. I think the game could get a little more interesting and exciting, but maybe not. 🤷‍♀️

While I enjoyed this game, I felt like there was something missing to make it a little more intriguing and/or puzzly. I like it and I find some aspects of it clever (and the theme is great) but I don’t love it. As a nature game fan, I was expecting to really enjoy it and I’m a little disappointed. The card stack mechanic is pretty unique, the game looks nice, and has some interesting elements, but I can’t see myself wanting to pull it off the shelf often.